Prescriptive decision analysis involves both formal methods and judgments by the decision maker. Consequently, prescriptive methods must meet two kinds of conditions for soundness, one related to formal adequacy, the other to the correspondence of models and methods with actual human capacities. This work proposes guidelines for evaluating these methods based on whether the features of human judgments needed to produce the requisite preference ordering support the assumptions of the models.

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... is distinct from a model's descriptive adequacy. will be chosen. The binary relation¨indicates the case where there is no consistent choice in favour of either alternative or where DM expresses indifference between them. Also, if the preference relation has the properties of transitivity and completeness, then one can define an order-preserving function, © ¢ , called a utility function.