University administrators involved in budget planning must trade off variables such as faculty size, faculty salary increments, tuition increases, and investment in new initiatives. TRADES is a computer-based, interactive financial model designed to assist in making trade-offs and finding...

In this paper we present a general model that enables us to better understand the decision of a patient whether or not to participate in a treatment, and, if so, the optimal timing for the treatment, from his point of view. The model takes into account both "objective information" which...

An analysis is made of a preference order dynamic programming procedure proposed in the literature for stochastic assembly line balancing problems. It is shown that in general the procedure does not satisfy the monotonicity condition and that therefore there is no guarantee that the solutions...

This note describes a different approach to urban modelling, resulting in a new, more general form of model. The model can be used for prediction, prescription, explanation, or evaluation; or to distinguish between the objectives of individuals, the planning authority, and the community. It is...

This article demonstrates that: (1) When a normally distributed decision variable is combined with an analytic utility function (one with derivatives of all orders and a power series expansion involving those derivatives), the expected utility can be expressed in powers of \mu and \sigma ². (2)...

Food preference and utility measures are functionally related to the frequency and quantity of foods consumed within fixed time periods. The coefficients of these functions can be estimated by psychometric or econometric methods. Total preference or utility can be maximized subject to budgetary...

Traditional definitions of stochastic dominance assume that the decision agent's preference-or-indifference relation on outcomes of risky decisions is transitive. This paper proposes a stochastic dominance relation for the comparison of risky decisions that is applicable to any complete and...

The impact of a decision maker's risk aversion on the choice of an optimal sampling plan is empirically examined for various batch sizes and prior distributions of the process quality level. These plans are compared to those of the classical linear cost model. The comparisons show that...

This paper develops a model to study the stay/leave decisions of Air Force officers. The model includes the most important institutional factors affecting an officer's career: promotion probabilities and timing, regular force integration probabilities, and mandatory separation and retirement...

Project Appraisal Methodology (PAM) is a multidimensional, easy to use tool for assessing the relative merits of R&D projects. It requires users to estimate three vectors of economic and scoring values: energy benefits, consumer savings and societal factors. The Division of Fossil Fuel...