Portfolio Decision Analysis

Winner of the 2013 Decision Analysis Publication Award

Portfolio Decision Analysis: Improved Methods for Resource Allocation provides an extensive, up-to-date coverage of decision analytic methods which help firms and public organizations allocate resources to 'lumpy' investment opportunities while explicitly recognizing relevant financial and non-financial evaluation criteria and the presence of alternative investment opportunities. In particular, it discusses the evolution of these methods, presents new methodological advances and illustrates their use across several application domains.

The book offers a many-faceted treatment of portfolio decision analysis (PDA). Among other things, it (i) synthesizes the state-of-play in PDA, (ii) describes novel methodologies, (iii) fosters the deployment of these methodologies, and (iv) contributes to the strengthening of research on PDA. Portfolio problems are widely regarded as the single most important application context of decision analysis, and, with its extensive and unique coverage of these problems, this book is a much-needed addition to the literature. The book also presents innovative treatments of new methodological approaches and their uses in applications.

The intended audience consists of practitioners and researchers who wish to gain a good understanding of portfolio decision analysis and insights into how PDA methods can be leveraged in different application contexts. The book can also be employed in courses at the post-graduate level.

"Resource allocation problems are ubiquitous in business and government organizations. Stated quite simply, we typically have more good ideas for projects and programs than funds, capacity, or time to pursue them. These projects and programs require significant initial investments in the present, with the anticipation of future benefits.   This necessitates balancing the promised return on investment against the risk that the benefits do not materialize. An added complication is that organizations often have complex and poorly articulated objectives and lack a consistent methodology for determining how well alternative investments measure up against those objectives.

I am pleased to see that [the editors] have succeeded in attracting a diverse collection of contributions from a distinguished set of authors. The editors do an excellent job of providing an overview of these contributions in their introductory chapter. I simply conclude by encouraging you to take up where these authors leave off, either by furthering the development of new theory and methods, or by putting these theories and methods to the test in real organizations struggling to make the best use of scarce resources."

Don N. Kleinmuntz, Strata Decision Technology, LLC