Specification of objectives in decision problems

If a decision problem is said to be difficult, one usually assumes that there is a very complicated relationship between the decision and the corresponding outcome. The problem is considered as solved when this relationship has been sorted out and described. This means that the probelm of selecting the best outcome from a set of possible outcomes, is taken as trivial. The main, or only difficulty is to find the decision which will lead to the best of the possible outcomes. The author argues that the real difficulty may often be to specify a preference ordering over the set of outcomes. He illustrates the point with examples from economics, and discusses some investment problems, in which the outcome of a decision naturally can be considered as a stochastic process.