Eliciting and valuing information

Before you can value information you have to have it, and Mike Runge, Sarah Converse, and Jim Lyons provide a superb example of expert elicitation from a structured decision making workshop on managing the eastern migratory population (EMP) of whooping cranes. They calculate the partial expected value of information for each of 8 hypotheses about why the EMP is experiencing reproductive failures, and use this to figure out which management action would provide the greatest benefit to learning. Interestingly (is that a real word? Apparently yes.), the strategy that maximizes the weighted outcome under uncertainty is not the one that produces the greatest partial expected value of information - thus there is a tradeoff to be made between performance and information gain. Cool stuff. A great example of expert elicitation and entry point for that literature, as well as an example of the value of information calculations I mentioned here.
I like that they clearly identified the decision maker (singular).