Tables, Trees and Formulas in Decision Analysis.

The article discusses Decision Analysis (DA). A classic decision analysis (DA) problem is to select an optimal decision or sequence of decisions when faced with a numerable set of decision alternatives, a finite number of states of nature (scenarios) that may unfold in the future, and payoffs for each combination of these states of nature and decision alternatives. Three modes in decision analysis, table, formula and tree can be used to address this problem (for example [2, 18, 28]). These modes are equivalent, yielding the same solution for a given problem. To the user, the three modes may seem quite different, resulting in different degrees of difficulty to solve the problem, requiring different mathematical skills, and providing different insights into the input data, desired outputs and goals, and the solution. Nevertheless, most textbooks emphasize a single method for solving such problems, often ignoring or paying lip service to alternative methods (for example, in [18] the three modes are presented, each in a very incomplete way; in [2, 28] only the table method is presented completely, and tree method partially).