Decision Support

Here, research by my team and I is focused mainly on developing and testing decision support tools that may be used by people in a variety of different contexts. This part of our research portfolio, which has also been called “structured decision making,” represents the culmination of concepts and findings from our other three research themes: risk perceptions, judgment and decision-making, and consumer behavior. Specifically, a clearer understanding of how people form their perceptions and instinctively make judgments and choices lends itself to the development of decision aids that help decision makers to both overcome common biases in judgment, and to confront challenging tradeoffs that emerge in many complex and important decisions.

For example, we know from our research that people tend to incompletely (1) consider the range of objectives that guide their risk management decisions, (2) identify appropriate measures for these objectives, and (3) analyze unavoidable tradeoffs across competing objectives and options. So, we have developed tools that help people to identify, operationalize, and then consider a wide range of objectives when making decisions. We have also tested decision-support tools that help people to combine different alternatives into bundles or portfolios of options. And then, as part of this suite of tools, we tested approaches that help people to make tradeoffs when different viable options cause objectives to conflict. 

At the moment, we are in the early stages of work on a new project focused on developing and testing decision support tools that will help companies and other buyers design and critically evaluate alternative CO2 removal and offset portfolios that may be considered as part of carbon offtake agreements.