A framework for analysing decisions under risk

The main objective is to present a framework for analysing decisions under risk. The nature of much information available to decision makers is vague and imprecise, be it information for human managers in organisations or for process in a distributed computer environment. Some approaches address the problem of uncertainty, but many of them concentrate more on representation and less on evaluation. The emphasis in this paper is on evaluation and even though the representation used is that of probability theory, other well-established formalisms can be used. The approach allows the decision maker to be as deliberately imprecise as he feels is natural and provides him with the means for expressing varying degrees of imprecision in the input sentences. The framework we present is intended to be tolerant and to provide means for evaluating decision situations using several decision rules beside the conventional maximisation of the expected utility. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.