Personal Decision-Making

Approximately 10 years ago I copied a Basic program, from a PC
magazine, that provided you help with decision-making. Say you were
trying to decide what was the most important attribute for a potential
spouse. It did the following:

1.	You would input all the variables, i.e. age, hair color, height,
weight, education etc.

2.	Then it would present all the possible parings of those variables
and ask you to choose which one was the more important of the two. For
example (hair color vs. height, chose one) (education vs. weight,
choose one) and so on until all possible parings had been presented.

3.	Then based on your responses it would present the results as
weighted scores; for example:

Education	3.5
Age		3.2
Height		2.8 and so on.
     

So my question is where can I find that magazine or, even better, a
software program that would do the same thing. If neither can be found
how about a source of software tools for personal decision-making. The
emphasis here is on personal decisions as opposed to business
decisions or team decision-making.

Thanks, Tom

It sounds like you had a simple conjoint analysis program.  If you do
a search on Conjoint analysis software you will likely find
information about the kind of software you are looking for.

Conjoint is a technique often used by marketing researchers and has
major applications in new product development, advertising and any
other place where better understanding consumer preferences comes in
handy.  The problem is that conjoint is usually built into more full
featured statistical packages.  You may be able to find a freeware or
shareware version though.  Good luck.

Was intrigued by the idea so i whipped something together. Its quite
simple but I think it's what you looked for.

http://www.shoplagom.com/software_view.asp?id=863

Updated the software with a small manual and a few improvements to the
code. If you like more features please let me know. You find my e-mail
in the license file contained in the downloadable file.