The Value of Relevance
Robert J. Korsan · 1994
The highest cost technical activity in decision analysis, knowledge engineering and expert sys-tems development is probabilistic assessment. In-fluence diagram (ID) technology has reduced as-sessment and improved decision models dramat-ically. However, once an ID has been assessed from the decision-maker (DM) and determinis-tic sensitivity analysis performed, a method to price the relevance arrows in the ID would allow the DM to balance the cost of assessment against the improvement in the authenticity of the value lottery and accuracy of the recommended action. This paper outlines such a method to price rel-evance arrows in an ID contianing discrete un-certainties and discrete decisions. The method also determines the sensitivity of a decision to the probability of particular outcomes of any un-certain event.