DECIDING ON HOW TO DECIDE BEST

Regarding all methods of decision making as parts of the same subject, one is astounded to find that the field speaks to the practitioners about multicriteria decision making with a multi-forked tongue, different methods give different and conflicting outcomes even for very simple decisions. In this paper, five well-known decision theories are described and used to work out a simple decision to choose the best of three cars. The outcomes turn out not to be the same for all the methods, which is troubling because one would expect unique answers in decision making. Several "meta" criteria that are essential for making a decision theory to make a choice as to which decision approach is best.h is best.