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Exercises 67
(ii) ease of transport to the hotel, (iii) quality of the conference facilities,
(iv) comfort of the bedrooms and (v) quality of other facilities.
(a) The value tree was found to meet Keeney and Raiffa’s five criteria
of completeness, operationality, decomposability, absence
of redundancy and minimum size. Explain what these criteria
will mean in the context of the problem.
(b) The costs of using the hotels for the conference are given below,
together with scores that the organizers assigned to them for
the non-monetary attributes (0 = worst performance on the
attribute, 100 = the best).
Hotel Cost ($) Transport
Conference
facilities Comfort
Other
facilities
Alton 12 000 0 10 50 0
Buttermere 17 000 40 80 0 80
Castle 8 000 100 0 10 0
Dorset 16 000 100 90 100 70
Elm 18 000 60 100 90 100
The organizers were then asked to consider a hypothetical
hotel which had the lowest scores on all of the non-monetary
attributes. They were then asked to imagine that each of this
hotel’s attributes could be switched to its best possible value
(all else remaining equal) and asked to rank, and then weight,
the attractiveness of these possible switches. The results are
given below.
Attribute Weight
Transport 80
Conference facilities 100
Comfort 50
Other facilities 20
One of the organizers, who was not present during the decision
analysis session, expresses concern that ease of transport to the
hotel was acknowledged as being the most important attribute,
yet it has not been given the largest weight. Explain why the
weights might still be valid.
(c) SMART has been used to obtain aggregate scores for the nonmonetary
attributes and the results are given below. Show how
the score for the Alton hotel was obtained.