HBR Guide to Making Better Decisions

CHAPTER 11

Even Swaps: A Rational Method for Making Trade-Offs

by John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, and Howard Raiffa

Some decisions are easy. If you want to fly from New York to San Francisco as cheaply as possible, you simply find the airline offering the lowest fare and buy a ticket. You have only a single objective, so you need to make only a single set of comparisons. But having only one objective, as any decision maker knows, is a rare luxury. Usually, you’re pursuing many different objectives simultaneously. Yes, you want a low fare, but you also want a convenient departure time, a direct flight, an aisle seat, and an airline with an outstanding safety record. And you’d like to earn frequent flyer miles in one of your existing accounts. ...