ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES in rocky mountain coniferous ...

I An Example
I
Consider the purchase of an automobile as an example of the decisionmaking
process and as a weak analogy to the sorts of decisions faced by forest managers.
To the person choosing a car the most relevant attributes might be mileage, size,
style and price. Not everyone makes identical choices and not everyone uses the
same attributes, but most choices among automobiles are made on the basis of com-
paring a few highly salient features of those cars.
If a decision is to be made on the basis of a few attributes (and research
indicates that decisions are), then the information contained in the summaries of
those attributes should be well understood if the decisions are going to be good.'
The so-called simple attributes of mileage, size, etc. are really more complex.
What is meant by mileage--is it EPA figures for city driving, for highway driving,
for city and highway driving combined, at 55 mph, 70 mph, with car in tune, out of
tune--what? What is "sizeu--cubic feet, weight, headroom?
Each of these attributes has an infrastructure behind it. Mileage can be
considered in a uniform manner at the top level, but for complex decisions it is
important to have available more detailed knowledge about the summary figures. The
decisionmaker may only examine one final mileage figure--say EPA overall--but that
decisionmaker must be confident in that single figure; and the best way of creating
confidence in that final figure is to provide the more detailed information. The
information about the choice of automobiles could be organized as in figure 2.
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CAR IN-TUNE
/tPA Highway
CAR OUT- OF- TUNE
Figure 2,--Selecting information for an automobCZe purchase dedsion.
The decisionmaker should have summary figures about mileage, size, etc. availa-
ble when making the decision, but must be confident--i.e., must be able to examine
I the more detailed information in a convenient form.
For automobiles it is not so important to be able to dig deeply into depths of
the various attributes; but for forest managers who are expected to make defensible
decisions it is very important to have detailed information in a usable form, We
suggest that the information that forest managers need should be organized in a
hierarchial fashion as depicted in the example with automobiles (fig. 2).
'where "good" means that the decisions satisfy some criteria.