Decision-Making Software

There is a number of decision-making software advertised on the web, each claiming that their product is the best product to use for making the best decision in any situation or to any problem.

The decision- making software I selected was Logical Decisions®. This software allows you to evaluate choices by considering many variables at once, separating facts from value judgments, and helps you explain your choice to others. Logical Decisions® helps you find creative and comfortable solutions to your most difficult decisions by using techniques from decision analysis to help you make better and more logical decisions.

What is decision analysis? Decision Analysis is a set of quantitative decision-making techniques for decision situations in which uncertainty exists. (Chapter 2: Decision analysis, 1998) It is used to break complicated decisions down into small pieces that you can deal with individually and then recombine logically. A key goal of decision analysis is to make a clear distinction between the choices that you can make (the alternatives), the characteristics of the alternatives (quantified by the measures) and the relative desirability of different sets of characteristics (preferences). These distinctions let you clearly separate the objective and subjective parts of your decision. The alternatives and the way they are quantified using the measures are relatively objective. Even if there are uncertainties in the levels of the measures, it is usually possible to come to an agreement about how to characterize those uncertainties. In general, decision analysis helps you to understand why a decision is better or worse than the others. (Logical Decisions, 2005)

On the other hand, the relative importance’s (weights) of the different measures, the interactions between them and attitudes toward risk are inherently subjective. Reasonable people can have large disagreements on these subjects. You can not generally eliminate these subjective parts of a decision. Logical Decisions® provides methods for logically