Decision aids

The following two decision aids were designed as class projects by Psychology 453, taught by Jonathan Baron, fall 2000.

Consumer purchases: This is a general decision aid for consumer purchases such as vacations, colleges, cars, and computers. It does not provide information about the purchases; it assumes you already have gotten that (for example, from the Consumer Reports web page). Our page provides a standard framework - a list of fundamental objectives - that apply to all purchases. It is based on multi-attribute utility theory.

Fair division in negotiation: This is for negotiating division of undesired things, such as chores, or desired things, such as possessions (when splitting up). It is based on a procedure described by Stephen Brams and Alan Taylor in "Fair division," but it improves on that method by using a multi-attribute-based method for eliciting weights.

Amniocentesis decision aid. This one was not part of the class, and is not up to date with respect to the full set of options for fetal testing.

These decision aids, Copyright (C) 2000, Jonathan Baron, come with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details see this license and the links in it. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions (described in the license).

The students in the class were: Lolly Anderson, Vashti Bandy, Hugh Dornbush, Mamie Douglas, Jeff Koleba, Ilana Lam, Alana Nguyen, Yaron Roth, and Jo Seuk.

Prof. Jonathan Baron (baron@psych.upenn.edu)