Ever got stuck in making a decision after reading so many reviews and getting overwhelmed to the point that you almost didn’t buy a certain product?  There’s youtube, buyer reviews and endless commentary on some products that we cannot thoughtfully make a decision and could end up regretting our decision.  Here is a fairly simple process that can help you in your decision-making.

It’s called the multi-attribute utility model, also called a DAR (Decision Analysis Review) for those of you that come from a CMMI background.  This is something which I learned while I was in graduate school that uses mathematical analysis to evaluate and compare multiple products. Ultimately we want to know what is the best choice and this model focuses on you and really emphasizes what’s important to you so that you can assign scores to the alternative choices presented to you in a decision-making situation. While the experts who use this model often talk about high impact analysis, this can be practiced with a simple explanation and examples. This model is based on the assumption that there are apparent desires which are more important to you when selecting the best alternative, For example when looking for a new car you might like one over another based on characteristics such as price, reliability, fuel mileage, and space. The word attribute In the model is a quality or feature regarded as a characteristic or inherent part of something or someone. Essentially we rank the attributes of each product and determine What’s more important by weightage so that we can come up with the highest score and that score will ultimately tell us what is The best choice.

Lets see if we can run through an example real quick, for the sake of the exercise, I’m interested in buying a car and let’s assume that safety is my number 1 priority having recently become a father.  My other priorities in order are electronics, reliability, price and fuel Milage. I need the electronics package to be nice because I like doing things in the car like opening the sunroof, or connecting to my bluetooth or playing my favorite music.  Reliability is fairly important knowing that I want to get from one place to another.  While Price is important in the fact that I will be spending quite a bit, its not much of a burden since this car will get financed.  Fuel mileage is the least important to me because I use points from my credit card to get free gas.