Clearly, information is of the utmost importance in making economic decisions, especially when it comes to securities or other assets whose value dep… - Kenneth Arrow

I am old-fashioned enough to retain David Hume’s view that one can never derive “ought” propositions from “is” propositions. The two issues, method and value, are distinct.

Among economic phenomena which have in some way been tied up with the existence of uncertainty, three classes may be distinguished: (1) those which by their very definition are concerned with uncertainty; (2) those which are not related to uncertainty by definition but nevertheless have no other conceivable explanation; (3) those whose relation to uncertainty is more remote and disputable.

Strictly speaking, decision theory really is concerned only with the fourth part of the division given above, that is, the determination of the computational methods for optimization. Given the determination of the other three factors―the objective function, the range of policy alternatives, and the model―the ideal picture is that someone, presumable the firm that hires the operations researcher, hands him, on a silver platter, an objective function. By talking to the engineers, or by looking into a few scientific laws, he determines the policy alternatives available and also the model.