AN ASSIGNMENT APPROACH TO CHOOSING R&D EXPERIMENTS

ABSTRACT The criteria upon which R&D experiments are evaluated are subjective; therefore in practice it is extremely difficult to obtain a series of weights so that the trade‐offs between the various criterion can be analyzed. The problem is compounded when the experiments represent basic research and no prior history is available for utility estimation. This paper presents a graph‐theoretic interpretation of the selection process based only on the rank‐order of the alternatives thus eliminating the need for utility estimation. Index numbers are then obtained as the solution of an integer program. An application and the theoretical foundations of the procedure are discussed.