On the Assessment of Decision Quality: Considerations Regarding Utility, Conflict and Accountability

During the course of their lives, people are faced with many decisions—covering a wide variety of contexts and ranging in importance. Common decision-making topics include career moves, whether to get married (and, if so, to whom and when), what house to rent (or buy), where to shop for groceries and what to have for dinner. The need for making a good decision grows as the importance of the context increases. Unfortunately, it is often not obvious what constitutes a good decision. At the bottom line, the question of decision quality is the essence of decision sciences: a main goal of researchers in the discipline is to help improve people’s decision making. Yet, with few exceptions (e.g., Edwards et al., 1984; Lipshitz, 1989, 1995; Hershey & Baron, 1992, 1995; Frisch & Jones, 1993; Frisch & Clemen, 1994), this topic has received relatively little attention in the literature. Several reasons may account for the reluctance to treat it directly. First, the topic may be seen as too broad and ill-defined, rendering it virtually impossible to be treated in a systematic and concise manner. A second, related, reason may be that various classes of decisions can be defined, each requiring different judgment criteria (e.g., von Winterfeldt, 1980). Third, the discussion of “decisions about decisions” introduces the concept of second-order decision making. In turn, this would expose third-, fourth-, and fifth-order decisions, and so on ad infinitum.