On the Generation of Alternatives in Decision Analysis Problems

Our primary purpose in this paper is to identify options generation as an extremely important part of the decision-making task. We review the behavioural psychology and computer science literature, as well as the decision sciences literature, and discover an apparent lack of research on the problem. However, we are able to discern some important issues and use these to guide us in our attempt to define a framework for options generation. We do not attempt to devise an automatic options generation procedure, but focus on those factors that prevent the decision maker from constructing a rich set of decision alternatives. By doing this we are able to prescribe a prototype option prompting environment.