2. Sheena Loughlin, Dyana Warnock, and Jaclyn Napoleon are planning next year’s Welcome Week. They need to select the faculty member who will make the best kickball umpire. They have four candidate faculty members and rated them on five important attributes:

• Enthusiasm—The kickball game is supposed to help students relax and make new friends, so the umpire needs to get students excited.
• Knowledge of rules—The umpire is responsible for providing instructions on how to play the game and then making appropriate determinations of the outcomes (e.g. outs, foul balls, runs).
• Eyesight—The umpire needs to be able to see the ball and what the players are doing, in order to make the right calls.
• Athletic grace—At times, the umpire will need to fetch the ball and toss it to the pitcher; this requires athletic coordination to avoid tripping, throwing the ball in the street, or accidentally hitting the players.
• Ability to multi-task—The umpire must be able to see the plays to make calls (e.g. outs, foul balls, runs), keep score, remind players of the rules, be an enthusiastic cheerleader, and talk to students to make them feel welcomed at Rockefeller College… all at the same time!

Sheena and Jaclyn identified three potential faculty umpires and rated each on a scale of 1 to 5. The scores are in the table below.

• Make an Excel spreadsheet that lays out this information
• Develop a MAU model to make a recommendation about who should be next year’s kickball coach, assuming that all factors are weighted equally.
• See how your recommendation changes on the basis of changes on normalized values and weights. (Although they gave these scores, perhaps they were incorrect in their judgement—for example, maybe Prof. Martin’s knowledge of the rules is higher than they thought. Alternatively, perhaps they decide that the most important factor is enthusiasm, as the purpose of the game is to help students relax and have fun.) How robust is your recommendation?
• Martin was selected as this year’s kickball coach. Did Rock College staff make the right decision? Why or why not?
• What are some areas of uncertainty? Develop two alternative scenarios and run your scenario analysis

3. The New Mexico Department of Transportation (NMDOT) is looking for a new Deputy Director for the Division of Operations. Search committee members have agreed to consider the four basic criteria from the following MAU model: work experience, interpersonal skills, analytic skills and motivation. The status quo scenario introduced in the table includes the normalized values, weights and total utility for the four finalist candidates.

In the last stages of the selection process, a local newspaper revealed a scandal associated with agency, involving a fraud for several million dollars. Although there is no evidence that the NMDOT Commissioner was involved, there is some probability that he will resign in the next weeks. The case has gained the attention of the Senate and the White House, who are considering different forms of intervention. As a result of these series of events, the search committee has revised the weights and normalized values, creating three additional scenarios.

• Look at the values here and in the spreadsheet, to understand the formulas. (You do not need to do any calculations, this is just another way to set up the spreadsheet.)
• Use the three decision criteria (subjective utility, maximax, and maximin) and the information in the tables to make a recommendation on a candidate for the deputy director position, under each criteria.
• Decide which decision criteria is the best for this case. Which one fits your values? Make one recommendation to the search committee.

Attribution

By Luis F. Luna-Reyes, Erika Martin and Mikhail Ivonchyk, and licensed under  CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.