Models of Tradeoffs in a Hierarchical Structure of Objectives

Multiattribute utility models and cost-benefit models often arrange the objectives into a hierarchical structure in order to identify appropriate subobjectives and to select appropriate attributes to measure the subobjectives. This paper discusses nonadditive models that use the hierarchical structure in order to examine issues of tradeoffs that models in present use are not able to include. The models are sufficiently structured so that they can be applied by procedures that are similar to those available for other prescriptive models of preferences.