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Fifty years of probabilistic decision analysis: a view from the UK

  • Special Issue Paper
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Journal of the Operational Research Society

Abstract

In 1959, LJ Savage attended a statistics seminar held in his honour at the University of London, confronting those present with a radically different approach to reasoning about uncertainty. Britain was well placed to respond to Savage, as very similar ideas had been laid out in Britain a full generation earlier, and in the next few decades, British and British-based practitioners and researchers championed a collection of techniques for thinking quantitatively about uncertainty (which we call ‘Probabilistic Decision Analysis’), developing practice, and contributing to theoretic knowledge about the underlying psychology and mathematics. This effectively turned a collection of purely theoretical ideas into a practical modelling technology. In the first decade of the 21st century, some 50 years on, these ideas have made a noticeable influence on practice and thinking in various domains, but numerous challenges still remain.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is based on one of the two keynotes in the decision analysis stream of the 50th OR Society conference in York, 2008, and interested readers are welcome to contact us for the presentation slides. We are grateful to the organizers of OR50 for inviting us to give this paper and to the guest editor and two referees for their helpful comments.

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  1. London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

    A Morton & L D Phillips

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  1. A Morton
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  2. L D Phillips
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Morton, A., Phillips, L. Fifty years of probabilistic decision analysis: a view from the UK. J Oper Res Soc 60 (Suppl 1), S33–S40 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/jors.2008.175

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