On the Use of a Cumulative Distribution as a Utility Function in Educational or Employment Selection.

Abstract

Formal decision theory can make important contributions to educational or employment decision-making, provided one can quantify the utilities of different possible outcome such as test scores, grade-point averages or other common outcome variables. Utility is usually a monotonic increasing function of true ability or performance score. A cumulative probability function is then very convenient for describing one's utilities. Moreover, calculations of expected utility of a decision is greatly simplified when the utility and the probability function have the same functional form, e.g. both normal. A least-squares procedure for fitting a utility function is described and applied to truncated normal and beta distribution functions. (Author)

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Feb 01, 1981
Accession Number
ADA097465

Entities

People

  • James J. Chen
  • Melvin R. Novick

Organizations

  • University of Iowa

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Applied Psychology
  • Cognition
  • Decision Theory
  • Distribution Functions
  • Educational Psychology
  • Employment
  • Manpower Utilization
  • Military Research
  • New York
  • Normal Distribution
  • Personnel Management
  • Probability
  • Probability Distributions
  • Psychology
  • Random Variables
  • Social Sciences
  • Uss Carl Vinson

Fields of Study

  • Economics

Readers

  • Psychometric Testing or Psychological Assessment.
  • Regression Analysis.
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.