- Define the problem, characterizing the general purpose of your decision.
- Identify the criteria, specifying the goals or objectives that you want to be able to accomplish.
- Weight the criteria, deciding the relative importance of the goals.
- Generate alternatives, identifying possible courses of action that might accomplish your various goals.
- Rate each alternative on each criterion, assessing the extent to which each action would accomplish each goal.
- Compute the optimal decision, evaluating each alternative by multiplying the expected effectiveness of each alternative with respect to a criterion times the weight of the criterion, then adding up the expected value of the alternative with respect to all criteria.
How can I make a good decision?
Here is a six-step process from Paul Thagard ...