Assignment
Decision trees are attractive. They offer a straightforward way of writing down the various available alternatives, and choosing among them.
But here are some questions that s need answering.
1. Can the decision really be reduced to a set of discrete alternatives? Are there some factors that can't be listed and quantified, such as beauty and morality?
2. Where do the alternatives come from? Are they exhaustive; that is, have we discovered and listed all of them?
3. How confident are we in the outcome values, aka the payoffs?
4. How confident are we in the probabilities attached to the outcomes? Where on earth do they come from?
5. In short: Is a decision tree really useful in this situation, or is it just a way of camouflaging a wild guess, and making it look "rational?"