ABSTRACT
The theoretical foundations of decision analysis are a set of axioms that imply that the desirability of alternative courses of action should depend on the likelihoods of possible outcomes for each alternative and the preferences for those outcomes. The modeling capability of decision analysis provides a useful technique for representing and dealing with complex trade-offs. Decision analysis, however, fulfills a very important requirement; it provides a logical, systematic analysis that makes the necessary professional and value judgments explicit and combines these with the objective data for the problem. Decision analysis is a robust approach toward analyzing complex decision problems of any kind. It can be scaled down to accommodate a decision problem having a short time frame, or it can be expanded as much as time, effort, and funding permit. Decision analysis is the comparative technique that most directly describes the theory of "deciding".
