Decision trees are attractive. They offer a straightforward way of writing down the various available alternatives, and choosing among them.
But here are some questions that s need answering.
- Can the decision really be reduced to a set of discrete alternatives? Are there some factors that can’t be listed and quantified, such as beauty and morality?
- Where do the alternatives come from? Are they exhaustive; that is, have we discovered and listed all of them?
- How confident are we in the outcome values, aka the payoffs?
- How confident are we in the probabilities attached to the outcomes? Where on earth do they come from?
- In short: Is a decision tree really useful in this situation, or is it just a way of camouflaging a wild guess, and making it look “rational?"
- 8 years ago
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