Identifying objectives is essential for decision making, but individuals have difficulties stating their important objectives. In public and environmental decisions, the diverse views of stakeholders should be included, but eliciting a broad set of objectives is challenging. We (1) study the effectiveness of individual brainstorming for eliciting objectives in a real-world setting; (2) test three interventions to support individuals in generating objectives; (3) investigate which and how many stakeholders are necessary to generate a comprehensive set of objectives; and (4) develop a feasible elicitation procedure for practice. In an experimental test, 71 stakeholders participated in five decisions about regional wastewater infrastructure planning in Switzerland. Three interventions were tested with an online survey procedure: (i) providing category cues, (ii) a perspective-taking task, and (iii) providing a predefined master list of objectives. In simple brainstorming, participants stated few objectives (M = 3.3) associated with 2.9 different categories on average. Participants consistently missed objectives they later considered important. Providing a master list was the only intervention that substantially increased the number and breadth of objectives (M = 12 objectives in M = 5.3 categories). With the help of our survey, participants generated between 30 and 38 distinct objectives for each decision case. Between five and nine participants were sufficient to generate these; more participants did not contribute new objectives. Most decision makers need help generating their objectives; combining simple brainstorming with a master list is a straightforward improvement that does not require a facilitator. An online process is promising for involving a large group of stakeholders.

Introduction

Knowledge about objectives is decisive for any analytical decision-making effort (e.g. Keeney, 1992). In a rational decision, the selection of an alternative is based on its achievement of objectives. Thus, in procedures such as multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), identifying objectives at the beginning is key (Gregory et al., 2012; Keeney, 1992; Reichert, Langhans, Lienert, & Schuwirth, 2015). As the objectives define the content of the evaluation, analysis, and discussion of alternatives, different sets of objectives can lead to different decisions (Brownlow & Watson, 1987). The omission of objectives, perhaps due to an oversimplified problem representation, can bias the analysis (Montibeller & von Winterfeldt, 2015; Payne, Bettman, & Schkade, 1999). Therefore, the set of objectives should be generated carefully. However, in actual decisions objectives are often not identified at all, or only cursorily (e.g. Gregory et al., 2012). For public and environmental decisions, the identification of objectives is both particularly relevant and particularly difficult. The normative demand is that these decisions serve the public interest. Objectives can be an appropriate level at which to operationalize this concept and formulate an integrated perspective on these decisions. Often, a few individuals take these decisions on behalf of a much larger group of stakeholders. However, how we can support these representatives in generating a set of objectives that addresses a wide range of concerns is an open question. It is also unclear how the public can be directly involved in this process. At first glance, the task of identifying objectives appears trivial: we just ask the decision makers to list what they want. However, the process of eliciting and structuring objectives is often considered “more of an art than a science” (Keeney, 1988). Bond, Carlson, and Keeney (2008, 2010) have found that individual decision makers are unable to fully articulate their objectives and without additional support neglect objectives they actually consider important.