The public and regulators are naturally concerned about any decision that has uncertain but potentially serious health and environmental consequences. When facing such decisions, some individuals say we should resolve significant uncertainties before taking expensive action that may be...

Several approaches exist to illuminate and clarify public values relevant for making public policy decisions. These include surveys, indirect and direct value elicitation, focus groups and public involvement. This paper describes a new approach, called the public value forum, which combines...

Given a group composed of N individuals and given that each has rated all of the alternatives using a cardinal utility function, the problem is to aggregate these to obtain a group cardinal utility function for evaluating each alternative. The cardinal utilities indicate the strength of...

This paper addresses the problem of constructing a group cardinal social welfare function whose arguments are the individual utility functions of group members. Representation theorems are given which show that the social welfare function is restricted to special forms if certain "reasonable"...

Intro -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Part One: Concepts -- 1. Thinking about Values -- 2. The Framework of Value-Focused Thinking -- Part Two: Foundations -- 3. Identifying and Structuring Objectives -- 4. Measuring the Achievement of Objectives -- 5. Quantifying Objectives a Value...