Energy Decisions and the Environment

Tradeoffs: it is a cliché that they have to be made in nearly all personal, business, and governmental problems. People, firms, and government agencies have many objectives, goals, criteria, attributes, or performance indices that they use to judge possible courses of actions. The problem is that it is frus-tratingly rare that all of these desiderata can be met or maximized by one alternative. Instead, some options will be good in some criteria, and other alternatives will do better in others. Choosing an alternative means that priorities must be set; accomplishing some goals means sacrificing others. Setting priorities is hard for an individual to do, and even more difficult when there are many people involved in a decision, each with their unique perspective and values. Confronting a decision consists of understanding how well different options might perform on the objectives, and the uncertainties involved; of eliciting the values and priorities of the stakeholders in the decision, and perhaps helping the stakeholders to form those values; of applying those values to the options, resulting in recommendations; and of clarifying how values shaped the recommendations.

We know of few, if any, applications of MCDM methods that yield completely consistent results. If more than one method has been used in an application, their results generally diverge. Even if the methods are consistent, it is unlikely that all participants will arrive at the same rankings. Indeed, if they do achieve perfect consistency, the group undoubtedly has been poorly selected. We argued earlier that groups should encompass diverse views, including those of NGOs and likely intervenors in subsequent regulatory procedures. In such groups one should expect divergence of results. Finally, a participant applying the same method at the beginning and at the end of the process is very unlikely to arrive at the same result: as noted at the outset, one important purpose of the use of MCDM is to educate, to expose members of a diverse group to each other’s views, and to force people to really think about the issues and problems. The more successfully that objective is attained, the more likely it is that a participant will change some of his initial views.