Decision making and optimisation

Growing awareness of the need to take measure to avoid environmental crisis and conserve resources, as well as the force of public opinion mean that environmental factors have to be taken into account in a wide range of situations. In this article properties to be possessed by satisfactory decision making strategies are presented and the use of the widely employed technique of cost-benefit analysis in combination with willingness to pay as a measure of environmental goods, is shown to be unsatisfactory. Alternative techniques are considered, and the use of a criterion-based decision-making strategy with constraints, based on optimisation, is shown to provide all the properties presented