When you choose a place to live, what objectives are you trying to accomplish? What makes some apartments better than others? Would you rather live close to campus or far ther away and spend less money? What about the quality of the neighborhood? How about amenities such as a swimming pool?
Create a fundamental-objectives hierarchy that allows you to compare apartment options. Take care in doing this; be sure to establish the fundamental objectives and operational attributes that will allow you to make the necessary comparisons.
Once you are satisfied with your hierarchy, use it to compare available housing alterna- tives. Try ranking different apartments that are advertised in the classified section of the newspaper, for example. Be sure that your individual utilities follow the rules: Best takes a 1 and worst takes 0. (Try using the utility function for money that you assessed in Problem 14.12. You may have to rescale it so that your best alternative gets a 1 and worst gets a 0.) Assess weights using pricing out, swing weighting, or lottery weights. Evaluate your alternatives with the additive utility function.
If possible, use a computer-based multiattribute decision program to do this problem.