Creating Mathematical Models of Judgment Processes: From Policy-Capturing to Policy-Specifying

Planning for a computer-based personnel job opportunities system for the Air Force led to a requirement for a procedure to generate a "payoff" or "value" of the assignment of each person to each possible job. This report discusses three methods of weighting different information to form a single indicator of "payoff" or "value": explicit weighting and two implicit weighting methods--policy-capturing and policy-specifying, which are combined here into a more comprehensive method referred to as policy development. The policy-capturing process presents a series of decision situations to one (or more) policy makers and the policy maker assigns to each situation a number which reflects the value or payoff. Then, a mathematical model is derived by obtaining the regression equation that best predicts the policy maker's judgments.