Assignment 2 Graduate Decision Analysis
These are the assignment 2 readings. I recommend that you keep on top of the readings, doing one each day or two rather than letting this rather significant reading load accumulate.
Conceptual Readings:
1. Theory and Practice in Policy Analysis, Chapter 5
2. An Introduction to the Policy Process, Chapter 8
3. An Introduction to the Policy Process, Chapter 9
Practical Reading:
1. Theory and Practice in Policy Analysis, Chapter 9 – There are a lot of ways to get quantitative data: we can look things up (if they have already been recorded somewhere) and we can estimate or measure them ourselves. But sometimes none of these options seems possible or useful. In these rare cases, we might want to ask an expert (or a group of experts). However, there are a variety of reasons why we don’t want to just directly ask our question. Instead, we probably want to use some kind of a formal interview process to get the data we need, described in this chapter about “Expert Elicitation”.

Assignment 2:
Question 1: Essay (25 points), 1 single spaced page:
Chapter 8 discusses different theories about how decision-making is done in organizations. We normally think of organizations as if they are “rational individuals”, but decision-making often has complexity that makes the idea of “rationality” inappropriate. As such, a variety of other theories have been made to explain how organizations produce decisions.
In this essay, think of an organization that you are familiar with (company, Ministry, university, department, club, etc) and describe how it makes decisions, relating back to the ideas in Chapter 8. To what degree does bounded rationality or incrementalism apply? Do other theories of decision-making sound applicable to this organization? Why? (Examples can help a lot)
Question 2: Essay (25 points), 1 single spaced page:
Chapter 9 discusses policy design and tools to achieve particular goals. For this essay, I want you to consider a policy issue that has not yet been successfully resolved (if you have trouble thinking of anything, I would propose this topic: How should we ensure that self-driving cars are safe?).
For your issue, I want you to propose several different policy approaches that could be used to address the issue – try to come up with policy ideas that are pretty different from each other. What are the goals related to this issue and how might they conflict? What types of policy tools seem potentially useful? How efficient and effective are these different approaches?
Question 3: Short Report (50 points), 1-2 single spaced pages (with a figure):
I want you to practice doing a quantitative expert elicitation that produces a CDF of an expert’s estimate of an unknown number. You should follow the protocol described in chapter 9 of TPPA. You can choose your own topic for this. You only need to conduct the interview with one person and you only need to elicit one quantity (with uncertainty). I want you to do a good job eliciting the uncertainty/range of possible values for that quantity, so that you can build it up into a CDF. The quantity should be one that they don’t know exactly or can easily look up (so don’t ask how long they have worked at their job or the price of gasoline today in Dubai) – it should be something that they have some reasonable uncertainty about, which makes the elicitation more interesting.
Note: you want to make sure the interviewee is reasonably “expert” at the topic. This is most easily done by finding your expert first then figuring out an interesting topic that you think they’ll know about. [If you need a good topic, I suggest that most adults are reasonably expert at the following uncertain question: “How many years from now until you retire?”]
Your write-up should be a brief experimental report that includes each of the following:
1. A description of your experience in the interview, and the results. Did everything go as planned? If no, what happened and how did you accommodate the change? What were the results from your interview?
2. Include a table or graph showing the elicited CDF of the expert’s response.
3. Some discussion on what you learned from the process. Did the interviewee give a “good” answer, or was their response confusing or odd in some way? Did the interviewee come close to the true value (if you know it)?