Conclusions

• Decision theory provides a useful framework to explore alternatives.
  • It forces us to recognize that deciding not to take action is just as much a decision as deciding which action to take.

  • It forces us to recognize that we may err either by taking an unnecessary action or by failing to take a necessary action.

• It helps us formalize and categorize our thinking to make sure that we have considered all relevant possibilities.

• Quantitative analyses must be viewed as explorations of possibilities, not hard predictions, but
  • the process of quantification may help us to clarify our thinking, and

  • it provides us a way of assessing which parts of the decision tree have a particularly large impact on the outcome and of determining how robust our preferred course of action is to other possibilities. In complex problems this may not be evident from the outset.

• It makes clear that many of the political conflicts involving environmental and conservation decision-making arise because different participants in the process place different values on different aspects of the outcome. That's why we're going to try to talk a bit about values in the last two lectures of this course.