Two approaches to expert team resolution

Two approaches to the resolution of judgements of an expert team are contrasted. In 1987, the government of Finland appointed a committee of experts from various disciplines to study the social and environmental effects and risks of energy production. The committee used both a decision-analytic approach to the task, where risks of different alternatives were structured through a computer-supported analysis, and the traditional Finnish approach in which the aim is a consensus between experts. The comparison suggests that experts´ reluctance to apply a decision analytic approach is only partly due to the ignorance of the available methods. Informal procedures may be preferred in the team resolution because of not having to explicitly consider value-based aspects of the problem setting