6. Guidelines for Eliciting Expert Judgment as Probabilities or Fuzzy Logic

Evaluation and Decision Models with Multiple Criteria

“…It is why it is well adapted for collecting and aggregating opinions. The important literature on fuzzy logic, and the way to use it in aggregating experts' opinions by means of statistical or fuzzy approaches (Meyer and Booker, 2001;Meyer et al, 2002;McCarthy, 2007), will not be reviewed either. This property of 'universal approximator' is very useful in many problems, including engineering control (Passino and Yurkovich, 1997), and decision-making.…”

Interpreting, Representing and Integrating Scientific Knowledge from Interdisciplinary Projects

“…That is, we describe the role to those who contact us, ask them how to ask questions, and wait to see who begins to carry the work forward in their community (Meyer and Butterfield et al 2000). Once the insiders have been identified, we ask them privately what they would personally like to gain from participating in this work and how they will judge its success or failure.…”

“…If we elicit their reasons in advance, we can work toward their realization and ensure the continued participation and good will of the insiders. For example, in the high-tech reliability projects, insiders' motivations have ranged from wanting to pass on their knowledge before they retired; to developing a process for predicting reliability to the stage where it could be demonstrated in the field, adopted by the company, and applied to all new product development programs (Meyer and Butterfield et al 2000). Continued participation is the ideal because it allows the participants to more fully, deeply evolve the interpretation, representation, and integration of the knowledge.…”

“…Other parts of the protocol included timing the elicitation to after the company had announced and endorsed the project; and knowing the mechanisms by which the insider initially contacted the teams to solicit their participation. The information the insider gave to the teams to motivate their participation had been carefully designed according to what the insider and what we expected the team members to consider in deciding to participate (for further details, see Meyer and Butterfield et al 2000).…”

“…Measurements of the ionization are recorded as pulse-height distributions. Thus, experts (and expert systems) must identify the imprecise features of the pulse-height distribution and match these to precise features of radioisotope spectra (Meyer and Butterfield et al 2000).…”