Value and Values

Many decisions are done intuitively. Sometimes, this works well, and sometimes they lead us astray. Tools of systems engineering recognize human biases and ask about what we do best—specify what is most important to us under the circumstances. This chapter presents a brief introduction into this world (multi-criteria decision analysis) using an example comparing three fictitious wines to show how different preferences lead to different rankings of wine quality, even when using the same “objective” data. This is as it should be—tastes differ, and good decision support systems take this into account. At this point, we focus on decisions made by one person. Later chapters focus on combining a diversity of individual preferences into a group choice.