Decision Model for Selection of a Flat Screen Television to Purchase: An Application of Hierarchical Decision Modeling

New technologies in home entertainment have created a large number of options when selecting a television for home use. Most of the top selling television models today include a wide array of available features and options, and selecting the right model to fit one’s needs and desires has become a very complicated decision problem. For our paper we have decided to create a model to help aid in this decision process – using the inputs of 12 experts, all professionals between the ages of 25 and 35. We narrowed our experts to this range for two main reasons – one reason is that the majority of television watchers are above the age of 24 [1], and the other reason is so that we could use members of our research team as some of the experts. We also didn’t want cost to be the primary factor in television selection. (Thus wanted our experts to have an income). Since the selection of a television has become such a complex problem including both qualitative and quantitative decisions, we have chosen to use a hierarchical decision model (HDM) to aid customers in our target group looking to purchase a new television. HDM is a tool to present a large decision problem as a hierarchy of smaller and less complex decisions. A detailed discussion of HDM can be found in references [2] and [3]. In addition, other examples of applying the decision model to other applications can be found in references [4] and [5]