Abstract

Nations face two types of challenges—threats and opportunities—both of which are usually very uncertain. Intelligence analysis must support the selection of policy or action in response to both types of challenges. This article focuses on methodology in support of decisionmaking, and claims that different analytical tools are appropriate for threats and for opportunities. Decision support for responding to threats should be based on evaluating the robustness against uncertainty, while guaranteeing specified critical outcomes. In this approach, the quality of the outcome is adequate (the outcome is satisficed) while the robustness to surprise is maximized. This methodology is called robust satisficing. This differs from the standard approach of attempting to achieve an optimal outcome. Decision support for responding to opportunities should be based on exploiting favorable circumstances to facilitate (although not necessarily guarantee) better than anticipated outcomes. In this approach, the analyst supports a decisionmaker who aims at wonderful windfall outcomes at the lowest possible uncertainty. This is called opportune windfalling. We discuss several examples and explore the theoretical properties of, and relation between, these two decision strategies, based on info-gap decision theory.

摘要

国家面临两种类型的挑战——威胁和机遇——这两种挑战通常都非常不确定。情报分析必须支持应对这两类挑战的政策或行动选择。本文重点讨论支持决策的方法，并声称不同的分析工具适用于威胁和机遇。应对威胁的决策支持应基于评估针对不确定性的稳健性，同时保证指定的关键结果。在这种方法中，结果的质量是足够的（结果是令人满意的），同时对意外的鲁棒性也最大化。这种方法称为稳健满足。这与尝试实现最佳结果的标准方法不同。应对机会的决策支持应基于利用有利的环境来促进（尽管不一定保证）比预期更好的结果。通过这种方法，分析师支持决策者以尽可能低的不确定性获得美妙的意外收获。这就是所谓的意外之财。我们基于信息差距决策理论讨论了几个例子，并探讨了这两种决策策略的理论属性和之间的关系。