Gilberto Montibeller

• DSc in Engineering Economic Analysis
• Professor at Loughborough University

Behavioral Decision Research has provided a deep understanding of how humans form judgments and make choices, since its emergence in the 1950s. Underlying this body of research is the contrast of actual decision making with the paragons of rationality, which provide the idealized model on how humans should decide. Starting with the Ellsberg and All...

Decision Analysis has traditionally focused on the design and application of logically consistent tools to support decision makers during the process of structuring problem complexity, modeling uncertainty, generating predictions, eliciting preferences and, ultimately, making better decisions. Two commonly held assumptions are that the decision mak...

Health remains one of the most challenging realms for decision makers and policy making while critical for the well-being of humans, the stability of societies, and the development of economies. Decision making in this field ranges from medical doctors identifying the best treatments for patients, healthcare companies selecting the most promising d...

The COVID‐19 pandemic has highlighted that health security systems must be redesigned, in a way that they are better prepared and ready to cope with multiple and diverse health threats, from predictable and well‐known epidemics to unexpected and challenging pandemics. A powerful way of accomplishing this goal is to focus the planning on health capa...

Here we focus on the social complexities inherent to these choice processes, the discussion of which ranges from the selecting of options to the implementation of health security actions, which is then followed by the fostering of an environment wherein systematic learning can take place. If health leaders wish to select decision alternatives in a...

s Here we detail the ways in which decision alternatives can be evaluated in a situation wherein multiple objectives must be achieved and negotiated, alongside discussing the ways in which we must assess and rank health threats with multiple impacts. We first introduce the evaluation of alternatives which incurs two consequences, as this decision p...

We have previously presented the ways in which a health decision analysis can be conducted to systematically and thoroughly evaluate health security actions and health threats. This chapter focuses on how high-value options can be selected in health security decision processes. We present a discussion concerning the sources of evidence that can be...

In health security decisions, it is not possible to identify a solution for a health security problem that is better than the solution that is provided by the best decision option among all other options under consideration. This point highlights the importance of identifying, or, indeed, designing, strong decision alternatives for enhancing health...

In this chapter we discuss the main challenges and complexities in making health security decisions. This analysis may explain why taking health security decisions is a challenging process and highlight the benefits of using more systematic decision processes and reasoned approaches when making these decisions. We also examine how health security d...

A comprehensive and realistic assessment of impacts of health threats and health security actions is essential for any reasoned health security decision. However, the uncertainty that is present in the context of every health security decision poses a core challenge that must be considered in such assessments. Here we present how we can adequately...

There are many challenges and complexities involved when making health security decisions. We can better cope with these challenges and complexities if we implement a conceptually robust framework for making reasoned health security decisions, which is introduced in this chapter. We also position this decision making framework within Decision Scien...

Reasoned decision making necessitates that decision objectives are specified, as they define exactly what the health security team wishes to achieve with the decision and how societal value should be measured when assessing and choosing decision alternatives. These objectives can also guide the definition of the relevant consequences within the spe...

Judgments are always required in conditions of high uncertainty and in decisions with conflicting objectives. In this chapter we discuss three types of judgments that are required in health security decisions: defining risk limits for levels of impact, establishing marginal value over relevant consequences, and determining trade-offs among conflict...

Health security decisions are invariably characterized by their complex nature. Among those many complexities, there exists an unclear decision context and, as a result, it remains ambiguous as to which aspects should be included in and excluded from a health decision analysis. In this chapter we discuss how public health leaders can adequately fra...

Uncertainty forms a key complexity in any health security decision. Uncertainties arise when the evidence about impacts of health threats is either incomplete or lacking and also from the imprecisions in estimating the future performance of decision alternatives. Here we discuss ways in which we are able to incorporate uncertainty in the evaluation...

Formal expert elicitation is a widely used method for quantifying uncertain variables in decision and risk analysis. When estimating uncertain variables, experts and laypeople exhibit overprecision, meaning that the ranges of their estimates are too narrow. Overprecision, a form of overconfidence, is pervasive and hard to correct, thus posing a cha...

Sports mega‐events, such as the Olympic Games or the Super Bowl, are attractive targets for terrorist organizations, due to their visibility, size, and number of people involved. Two characteristics of sports mega‐events, however, make them distinctive in comparison with other well‐studied target protection problems in counterterrorism analysis (su...

The increasing need to manage biosecurity threats, such as diseases, zoonoses, and biological weapons, poses serious challenges for risk analysts and policymakers. These threats are large in number, can occur concurrently, and may cause multiple tangible and intangible impacts. They often have an emerging nature, exacerbated by incomplete evidence...

Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) has emerged as a likely methodology for Health Technology Assessment (HTA). However limited empirical evidence is available on its use by decision-makers and only as part of single-setting exercises, without cross-county studies available. This pilot study applies the Advance Value Framework (AVF), an MCDA...

The ever-increasing availability of large data-sets that store users’ judgements (such as forecasts and preferences) and choices (such as acquisitions of goods and services) provides a fertile ground for Behavioural Operational Research (BOR). In this paper, we review the streams of Behavioural Decision Research that might be useful for BOR researc...

Humanitarian organizations (HOs) increasingly look to engage private sector supply chains in achieving outcomes. The right engagement approach may require knowledge of agents’ preferences across multi-echelon supply chains to align private sector value creation with humanitarian outcomes. We propose a multi-attribute value analysis (MAVA) framework...

Behavioral decision research has demonstrated that value and uncertainty judgments of decision makers and experts are subject to numerous biases. Individual biases can be either cognitive, such as overconfidence, or motivational, such as wishful thinking. In addition, when making judgements in groups, decision makers and experts might be affected b...

Quantitative risk analysis is being extensively employed to support policymakers and provides a strong conceptual framework for evaluating decision alternatives under uncertainty. Many problems involving environmental risks are, however, of a spatial nature, i.e., containing spatial impacts, spatial vulnerabilities, and spatial risk‐mitigation alte...

Background Multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) has appeared as a methodology to address limitations of economic evaluation in health technology assessment (HTA), however there are limited empirical evidence from real world applications. The aim of this study is to test in practice a recently developed MCDA methodological framework known as A...

Objective To describe the development of an evaluation framework thatallows quantification of surveillance functions and subsequentaggregation towards an overall score for biosurveillance systemperformance.IntroductionEvaluation and strengthening of biosurveillance systems is acomplex process that involves sequential decision steps, numerousstakeho...

The occurrence of unexpected events that are extreme in magnitude, rare in frequency, and short-lived in duration poses distinctive challenges to decision makers and planners. In this paper we examine the impact of negative versions of these events, which we term “shocks”, on the judgmental forecasts of subjects experiencing them. A behavioral expe...

Resumo Análise de risco de terrorismo é um dos maiores desafios enfrentados pelas autoridades que definem a política de alocação de recursos de uma nação. Este artigo provê uma breve revisão de duas abordagens tradicionalmente usadas para esse propósito: Análise de Risco Probabilística e Teoria dos Jogos. Adicionalmente, ele introduz no contexto br...

INTRODUCTION We test in practice a Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) framework for the value assessment of a set of therapeutic options for the indication of hormone relapsed metastatic prostate cancer (mPC) through a series of simulation exercises with the participation of decision makers from different Health Technology Assessment (HTA)/...

A methodological approach is needed for allocating health care resources in an efficient and fair way that gives legitimacy to decisions. Currently, most priority setting approaches tend to focus on single or limited benefit dimensions, even though the value of new health care interventions is multi-dimensional. Explicit elicitation of social value...

Idiographic causal maps are extensively employed in Operational Research to support problem structuring and complex decision making processes. They model means-end or causal discourses as a network of concepts connected by links denoting influence, thus enabling the representation of chains of arguments made by decision-makers. There have been prop...

This paper explores the effectiveness of several methods to reduce the overconfidence bias when eliciting continuous probability distributions in the context of multicriteria decision analysis. We examine the effectiveness of using a fixed value method (as opposed to the standard fixed probability method) and the use of counterfactuals and hypothet...

A key objective for policymakers and analysts dealing with terrorist threats is trying to predict the actions that malicious agents may take. A recent trend in counterterrorism risk analysis is to model the terrorists' judgments, as these will guide their choices of such actions. The standard assumptions in most of these models are that terrorists...

Recent events, such as the Boston Marathon attack, emphasize how important is the planning against the occurrence of terrorist activities during major events. This article provides a brief critical review of the approaches, which have been traditionally used in terrorism risk management and the implications for the next sporting events in Brazil.

Behavioral decision research has demonstrated that judgments and decisions of ordinary people and experts are subject to numerous biases. Decision and risk analysis were designed to improve judgments and decisions and to overcome many of these biases. However, when eliciting model components and parameters from decisionmakers or experts, analysts o...

Probability elicitation protocols are used to assess and incorporate subjective probabilities in risk and decision analysis. While most of these protocols use methods that have focused on the precision of the elicited probabilities, the speed of the elicitation process has often been neglected. However, speed is also important, particularly when ex...

Developing models and estimating parameters for multi-criteria decision analysis requires judgments by experts and decision makers. These judgments are subject to biases, which can reduce the quality of the analysis. Some of these biases are due to faulty cognitive processes, some are due to motivations for preferred analysis outcomes. We describe...

Managers frequently deal with risk by considering uncertainty as an element of the decision problem over which they can exert control, for example lobbyists trying to exert influence over regulators, or advertisers designing marketing campaigns to improve the chance of success of a new product. Although such interventions on uncertain events can be...

The estimation of costs associated with Operational Risks is a regulatory initiative to protect the solvency of financial organizations and to motivate better management processes for mitigating risks associated with ‘loss’ events. A sophisticated way to measure Operational Risk quantitatively is based on calculating the Value-at-Risk of the loss d...

A crescente ocorrência de desastres, afetando a vida de grande parte da população mundial, torna as desafiadoras ações humanitárias de socorro às vítimas ainda mais importantes. Para o desenvolvimento de modelos de apoio à decisão adequados à logística de operações humanitárias, é importante que sejam identificados critérios de desempenho que melho...

Supplier selection is a challenging decision that has strategic importance for organizations. Cost is no longer the sole factor in the selection of suppliers, and the complexity of this issue arises from the interplay of several situation-specific criteria (such as total cost, CO2e emissions, development time, lead time) as well as the combinatoria...

The region of the Americas pledged to eliminate dog-transmitted human rabies by 2015. After 30 years of sustained efforts, regional elimination appears possible as dog-mediated human rabies cases are at an all-time low, and a number of countries and territories have already eliminated the disease. In this setting, there is an opportunity to generat...

The growing impact of the “analytics” perspective in recent years, which integrates advanced data-mining and learning methods, is often associated with increasing access to large databases and with decision support systems. Since its origin, the field of analytics has been strongly business-oriented, with a typical focus on data-driven decision pro...

Introduction There appears to be a growing number of prioritization exercises, for example of diseases, in health related settings (1). The decision process around these exercises involves comparing competing alternatives, i.e. diseases, and irreducible objectives. In addition to the multi-dimensional nature of the problem, the lack of reliable dat...

While most probability elicitation procedures have focused on the precision of the elicited probabilities, the speed of the elicitation process has often been neglected. Furthermore, most elicitation procedures are numerical in nature. However, there can be various reasons why an expert to refuse to give such ratio-scale estimates, for instance whe...

The UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs supports the use of systematic tools for the prioritisation of known and well defined animal diseases to facilitate long and medium term planning of surveillance and disease control activities. The recognition that emerging events were not covered by the existing disease-specific approache...

With ever-increasing terror threats, governments and security officials would benefit from a better understanding of what motivates terrorists to cause social unrest. A recent research trend is on gaining greater knowledge about the values of malicious agents to help manage the risk of terrorism. As a result, there seems to be the potential to use...

Resource allocation in local government imposes several challenges for public managers, such as substantial pressures for more efficiency in public spending, frequent changes in levels of income for public organisations, steadily growing demand for public services, and higher public expectations and increased scrutiny. In order to tackle these chal...

This paper discusses the use of multi-criteria decision analysis for supporting strategic decision making in organisations. It begins by exploring the notions of strategic decisions and the strategic decision-making process. We suggest that structuring strategic objectives, dealing with high levels of uncertainty about the future, as well as consid...

Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is well equipped to deal with conflicting, qualitative objectives when evaluating strategic options. Scenario planning provides a framework for confronting uncertainty, which MCDA lacks. Integration of these methods offers various advantages, yet its effective application in evaluating strategic options would...

Locating logistic facilities, such as plants and distribution centres, in an optimal way, is a crucial decision for manufacturers, particularly those that are operating in large developing countries which are experiencing a process of fast economic change. Traditionally, such decisions have been supported by optimising network models, which search...

Since the 1980s, an alternative to the traditional “expert” mode of model-based consultancy has been suggested, where the management scientist acts both as an analyst and as a facilitator throughout the intervention. This alternative approach uses facilitated modeling as the main intervention tool, which requires the management scientist to carry o...

The traditional way of employing operational research in organisational interventions has been the expert mode. In this mode, the problem situation faced by the client is given to the operational research consultant, who then builds a model of the situation, solves the model to arrive at an optimal (or quasi-optimal) solution, and then provides a r...

Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) has been extensively used in Management Science as a tool for evaluating options in decisions which involve the achievement of multiple objectives. Multi-criteria methods have been widely researched from an axiomatic perspective; however, much less attention has been devoted to the process of structuring mult...

In this chapter we discuss the use of MCDA for supporting strategic decision making, particularly within strategy workshops. The chapter begins by exploring the nature of strategic decisions and the characteristics of the strategic decision making process. Specifically, we examine the technical issues associated with the content of strategic decisi...

Multi-criteria portfolio modelling has been extensively employed as an effective means to allocate scarce resources for investment in projects when considering costs, benefits and risks. Some of these modelling approaches allow the grouping of projects into organisational areas, thus also supporting the decision of resource allocation among organis...

Cognitive/causal maps have been widely used as a powerful way of capturing decision-makers' views about a problem, representing it as a cause-effect discourse. Several ways of making causal inferences from this type of model have been proposed in the Operational Research and Artificial Intelligence literatures, but none, as far as we are aware, has...

Government (E-Gov) projects are increasingly being implemented worldwide. However, the risk management literature relating to E-Gov development projects is minimal compared with traditional Information System (IS) development projects. The success or failure of such projects depends on a number of obstacles to be overcome. Traditionally project act...

In the fast moving software industry, projects have been increasingly developed by distributed teams, which are located in geographically remote offices and collaborate using information communication technologies. In such environments, project distribution presents specific challenges, as work in distributed teams increases project technical compl...

This paper proposes a tool for multi-criteria decision aid to be referred to as a Reasoning Map. It is motivated by a desire to provide an integrated approach to problem structuring and evaluation, and in particular, to make the transition between these two processes a natural and seamless progression. The approach has two phases. In the first one,...

Factoring companies are a widespread way of providing working capital to small enterprises in Brazil. This type of financial transaction has higher risks when performed in developing countries, due to unreliable financial information on firms, an unstable environment, and particular managerial practices. This paper describes a case study in which a...

Action-Research, a research strategy that permits the systematic investigation of an issue while intervening in an organisation, has been advocated as an appropriate method for studying Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) interventions. This research strategy may be useful for MCDA researchers who want to test MCDA methods in real-world problem...

The integrated use of scenario planning and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) has been advocated as a powerful combination for providing decision support in strategic decisions. Scenario planning helps decision makers in devising strategies and thinking about possible future scenarios; while MCDA can support an in-depth performance evaluation...

Causal maps are widely employed in problem-structuring interventions. They permit a rich representation of ideas, through the modelling of complex chains of argument as networks. The last stage of a problem-structuring intervention is often to identify and agree to a set of potential strategic options. In some circumstances the preferred direction...

The social processes involved in engaging small groups of 3-15 managers in their sharing, organising, acquiring, creating and using knowledge can be supported with software and facilitator assistance. This paper introduces three such systems that we have used as facilitators to support groups of managers in their social process of decision-making b...

The field of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is now mature, with several well- developed methodologies, a growing number of real-world interventions and a strong society that joins together researchers and practitioners all over the world. We believe that a new generation of multi-criteria decision analysts is emerging - interested in doing...

Problem structuring methods (PSMs) aim to build shared understanding in a group of decision makers. This shared understanding is used as a basis for them to negotiate an agreed action plan that they are prepared to help implement. Engaging in a social process of negotiation with a large number of people is difficult, and so PSMs have typically focu...

A factoring company is a means to provide working capital for small and medium sized companies that sell goods and/or services on a delayed- payment basis, by selling their accounts receivable to that factoring company. This paper describes the real life process of multicriteria model construction for Plaza Invest Factoring Co. (Brazil), using a de...

The production engineers and economists usually assume a rationalistic position, and impose economical criteria which the decision-makers should adopt in models that perform an evaluation of solution for their (decision makers') problem. We, on the other hand, adopt a cognitive approach. Hence we sustain a position that the criteria should be based...

The Operational Research and others Engineering-based Sciences usually assume that the problem is well-defined, and so ready to be modeled. But when we have complex problems, with many actors each one with his/her own value system, the problem is neither well-defined nor well-structured. In this paper we will present a tool to aid in problem struct...