Howard Raiffa

The Even- Swap Method for Multiple Objective Decisions

Many important decision problems require value tradeoffs among conflicting objectives. Typically, some alternatives are better on some objectives and some alternatives are better on other alternatives. In these situations, the even-swap method allows you to explicitly focus on the relevant value tradeoffs to make a smart choice. The method guides you to make value tradeoffs that allow you to sequentially eliminate objectives by rendering them irrelevant to the choice and then eliminate dominated alternatives. The procedure repeats until one dominant alternative — the smart choice — is left.