Locked lesson.

Upgrade

About this lesson

Tell 1000minds what your preferences are by answering a series of questions involving trade-offs.

Exercise files

There are no related exercise files for this lesson.

Quick reference

Trade-offs

Answer a series of questions involving trade-offs so that 1000minds can find out what your preferences are, and use that information to score and rank your alternatives.

When to use

You can make trade-offs anytime after entering your criteria, either before or after adding alternatives (or costs and other considerations). You must make trade-offs before you can view your results.

Instructions

Making trade-offs

  • To access the trade-offs section, click on "trade-offs" in the menu on the left
  • Choose whichever alternative you prefer, or if you prefer both equally (or dislike both equally), choose "they are equal"
  • "Undo" (bottom left) – Click this to undo your last trade-off. You will be immediately presented again with that question.
  • "Skip" (bottom right) – If you are unsure about how to answer a trade-off, click this button to skip it.
    • It may be implicitly answered by your later trade-offs, in which case you won't have to answer it.
    • If the question isn't implicitly answered, you will be presented with this question again later.
  • "Start over" (bottom center) – Click this to permanently undo all your trade-offs. Careful – this action cannot be undone!

Customization

  • Edit the question text by clicking on the pencil icon to the right of the question, or by toggling the sidebar on the right (click the arrow in the upper right corner) and changing the question in the options.
  • Add a subtitle by going to the options
    • You can format the subtitle using markdown. Click on the rectangular icon next to "subtitle" for more information on how to do this.
  • Customization can be very useful for group decision-making, which is done by clicking the "enable voting" button in the options.

Reviewing trade-offs

  • In the menu on the left, click on the arrow next to "trade-offs", then click on "review and undo".
  • Reviewing a trade-off presents you with that question again immediately, so you can change your answer.
  • Trade-offs marked as redundant cannot be reviewed and won't affect your results if you undo them.
  • Undo all trade-offs by clicking on the "undo all trade-offs" button on the top left.

 

Hints & tips

  • Costs and other considerations are not included in your trade-offs. To factor these into your decision, go to the value-for-money chart on the alternative selection page.
  • After finishing all trade-offs involving two criteria, you can go on to make trade-offs with more criteria. This is not completely necessary, but will increase the precision of your results.
  • If you would like to redo your trade-offs but don't want to permanently lose your previous results, follow these steps:
    1. Go to the projects page
    2. Scroll down to your project and hover over the decision in question
    3. Click on the three dots all the way on the right-hand side of the decision 
    4. Click "Revisions"
    5. Click "Create a new revision"
    6. Now you can do anything you want to this model, and have your previous results saved! If you would like to restore a previous revision, repeat steps 1-4 and click "switch" to go back to your previous revision.
Login to download
  • 00:06 In this video, we'll be looking at the trade-offs page of 1000minds.
  • 00:12 And this is essentially the heart of 1000minds and
  • 00:15 what the PAPRIKA method is all about.
  • 00:18 In the trade-offs, you'll be given a series of two alternatives to choose between,
  • 00:23 each of which involves some sort of trade-off based on your criteria.
  • 00:29 The trade-offs you make are used to determine the preference values of your
  • 00:33 criteria, which are then used to score your alternatives.
  • 00:38 In other words, your trade-offs determine how important each of your
  • 00:42 criteria is to you relative to each other.
  • 00:46 And using those results,
  • 00:47 1000minds will rank your alternatives from highest to lowest.
  • 00:53 For this example, we'll be using this decision-making model where we're
  • 00:58 looking at different cities to move to.
  • 01:01 These are our criteria and their levels.
  • 01:04 These are the costs and other considerations.
  • 01:07 And our alternatives are different cities.
  • 01:11 The trade-offs only focus on the criteria and
  • 01:14 levels, so these costs and other considerations are not included.
  • 01:19 They will be included in the value-for-money chart
  • 01:22 in the results section later on.
  • 01:27 So let's take a look on how to make trade-offs.
  • 01:30 Notice right away that we're not asked a question where one choice is clearly
  • 01:34 better than the other.
  • 01:36 In the alternative on the left, the weather is bad,
  • 01:40 but the nightlife is excellent.
  • 01:42 In the alternative on the right, the weather is great,
  • 01:45 but there's no nightlife.
  • 01:47 That's why it's called trade-offs, because we're telling the system what we're
  • 01:52 willing to give up in order to gain something else.
  • 01:55 In this case, let's say that we prefer the alternative on the right.
  • 02:01 Here we have okay nightlife and a beach, or excellent nightlife but no beach.
  • 02:08 The alternative on the left sounds like the better option.
  • 02:13 In some cases, we might prefer both alternatives equally
  • 02:17 or dislike them equally.
  • 02:19 In which case we can say that they're equal.
  • 02:23 If we want to undo a decision, we can click Undo on the bottom here.
  • 02:29 If we want to undo all our trade-offs, we can do so by clicking on Restart.
  • 02:34 But keep in mind that once we click this option, it can't be undone.
  • 02:40 Maybe in this case we're not certain about our preference.
  • 02:44 We can skip a question for now by clicking on Skip.
  • 02:48 There is a chance that we will still have to answer this question later
  • 02:52 but it is likely that the question will be implicitly answered by
  • 02:56 the other trade-offs we make.
  • 02:57 In which case we won't have to answer it.
  • 03:02 We can also add any comments for a particular trade-off,
  • 03:05 which can be useful when reviewing our trade-offs later.
  • 03:10 However, any comments entered will disappear if we undo our trade-offs.
  • 03:17 By clicking on this button to the right, we can open the sidebar.
  • 03:21 Here we can rephrase the question to anything we like.
  • 03:26 The question will update automatically if we click anywhere outside the text box.
  • 03:31 We can even add subtitles here as well and use markdown to format the subtitle text.
  • 03:39 To see how accurately our decision model reflects our preferences so far,
  • 03:44 we can click to show the accuracy estimate.
  • 03:47 And you can see it up here.
  • 03:50 The more trade-offs you make, the higher your accuracy estimate will be.
  • 03:55 In general, it's good to aim for at least 90% accuracy,
  • 03:58 especially if your alternative scores and preference values are also important to you
  • 04:03 rather than just your alternative rankings.
  • 04:07 At the top, we see this bar here, which shows us our progress and
  • 04:11 how many trade-offs we've already completed.
  • 04:14 The number of trade-offs we have to make depends on the number of criteria we have,
  • 04:20 the number of levels on our criteria, whether or
  • 04:24 not we specified any impossible combinations, and the trade-offs we make.
  • 04:30 If we wanted the input of a group of people when it comes to making trade-offs,
  • 04:34 we could click the Enable Voting button.
  • 04:37 We will discuss more about the voting feature in another video.
  • 04:45 Once we finished making trade-offs, we see our accuracy estimate here.
  • 04:49 To increase the accuracy, we can click on Go to Next Level and continue making
  • 04:54 trade-offs, but with three criteria at a time rather than two criteria.
  • 05:04 We can also view our results right away by clicking Go to Results, or
  • 05:08 review the trade-offs we've made under review and undo,
  • 05:12 either on the bottom here or in the menu on the left under Trade-offs.
  • 05:18 We will look at the results section in the next video.
  • 05:20 So for now, let's look at reviewing our trade-offs.
  • 05:25 Here we are given a list of all the trade-offs we made.
  • 05:29 You can change a trade-off by clicking on Revisit, or undo it by clicking Undo.
  • 05:41 As we see here, some of the trade-offs are marked as redundant.
  • 05:46 This is because as we continue to answer questions,
  • 05:49 some of our previous trade-offs were already implied by later ones or
  • 05:54 by a combination of our later trade-offs, making this trade-off redundant.
  • 06:00 Of course, 1000minds didn't know this until we continued to make trade-offs, or
  • 06:04 otherwise it wouldn't have asked us the redundant questions in the first place.
  • 06:10 But as we see here,
  • 06:11 these questions do not have a Revisit button because their answer is redundant.
  • 06:17 And therefore undoing them also won't have an effect on our results.
  • 06:24 If you wanted to undo all our trade-offs, we could do so
  • 06:28 easily by clicking Undo All Trade-offs in the top left corner.
  • 06:33 This will permanently delete all of our trade-offs.
  • 06:38 Now that you know how to make and review trade-offs, it's time for
  • 06:42 you to try it out yourself.
  • 06:44 Tell 1000minds what it is that you really care about.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.

Gift this course