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2
How people make decisions
involving multiple objectives
Introduction
This chapter looks at how ‘unaided’ people make decisions involving
multiple objectives. Many decisions involve multiple objectives. For
example, when choosing a holiday destination you may want the resort
with the liveliest nightlife, the least crowded beaches, the lowest costs,
the most sunshine and the most modern hotels. As a manager purchasing
goods from a supplier, you may be seeking the supplier who has
the best after-sales service, the fastest delivery time, the lowest prices
and the best reputation for reliability. By ‘unaided’ we mean people
facing decisions like this without the support and structure provided by
the decision analysis methods that we will introduce in the subsequent
chapters.
Suppose that we asked you to multiply 8 by 7 by 6 by 5 by 4 by
3 by 2 by 1 in your head. You could probably make a good guess at
the correct answer but may, or may not, be surprised that the ‘correct’
calculator-derived answer is 40 320. Which do you believe produced
the most valid answer? Your intuition? Or the calculator? Most of us
would tend to trust the calculator, although we might run through the
keystrokes a second or third time to check that we had not miskeyed
or omitted a number. The conclusion from this ‘thought experiment’ is
that the human mind has a ‘limited capacity’ for complex calculations
and that technological devices, such as calculators, complement our
consciously admitted cognitive limitations. This assumption underpins
all of the decision analysis methods that are covered later in this book,
but what happens if decision makers are not aware of their cognitive
limitations and make decisions without using these methods?
According to research by psychologists decision makers have a toolbox
of available strategies and they are adaptive in that they choose the