Risk Attitudes Appraisal and Cognitive Coordination in Decentralized Decision Systems

In decentralized decisions systems, coordination and efficiency encounter major difficulties. To solve the problem, it is argued, the analyst needs to raise a cognitive representation question, in particular the question of the criteria according to which the problem at hand is being assessed in view of the whole organization. This, in turn, raises the issue of how these criteria are evaluated by the different individuals. An example based on a subset of the risk management system, namely the maintenance system in nuclear power plants, is used throughout the text. The paper argues that generalizing MAUT to rank dependent risk treatment is of utmost importance in order to deal with such problems. One additional theorem is proved in that perspective and an appropriate software reported upon and illustrated on an example. Beyond the technical problems examined in the paper, the way to use the decision analysis framework is discussed.