Article ID: | iaor20117243 |
Volume: | 59 |
Issue: | 3 |
Start Page Number: | 764 |
End Page Number: | 771 |
Publication Date: | May 2011 |
Journal: | Operations Research |
Authors: | Abbas Ali E, Bell David E |
Keywords: | decision theory: multiple criteria |
Assessment of multiattribute utility functions is significantly simplified if it is possible to decompose the function into more manageable pieces. Utility independence is a powerful property that serves well for this purpose, but if it is not appropriate in a given situation, what options does the analyst have? We review some possibilities and propose a new independence assumption based on the one‐switch property. We argue that it is a natural generalization of utility independence and show how it leads to tractable multiattribute utility functions.