Decision Analysis for the Professional

This book started life as a manual for the SuperTree decision analysis software package. The 3rd edition has been rewritten to be software-neutral and now incorporates the dialogue decision process (DDP) and the concepts of decision quality. Between this and Making Hard Decisions by Robert Clemen, DAftP is the more practical, and hence better, book for the ordinary professional working with a decision analyst, or as a first text for a trainee decision analyst wanting to learn about decision diagrams and decision trees, and how these tools should be used in real-world consulting engagements. Mathematical theory is nicely relegated to the "Advanced Topics" section and well written for those with a non-advanced mathematical education. I would have liked at least some mention of Monte Carlo simulation as an alternative to decision trees, but then it is only in the last year or so (DAftP was last updated in 2001) that Monte Carlo simulation has become a realistic alternative to simple decision tree analysis, largely abetted by the development by Sam Savage of the DIST standard for encoding probability distributions.

This book is an excellent intermediate-level text on decision analysis that deals with both uncertainty and risk. It uses realistic examples that working professionals will appreciate and to which they can relate. It's written as a tutorial that uses two tools, Sensitivity, which is used with the chapters dealing with decisions under uncertainty, and Supertree for developing decision trees related to risk analysis. Instructions on obtaining the student versions of these programs are included in the book. Note that the student version of Supertree accommodates trees with up to 250 endpoints, and the student version of Sensitivity performs sensitivity for up to 12 variables. My most used text on decision analysis is Making Hard Decisions by Robert T. Clemen. Where that book is more comprehensive, it's also less suitable for the working professional who needs a refresher and a desk reference. Therein lies the main value of this book - it's more aligned to real world problems that you'll find in the workplace and is written to be both a tutorial and a reference.