The even-swap method for multiple objective decisions

Many important decision problems require value tradeoffs among conflicting objectives. Typically, some alternatives are better on some objectives and some alternatives are better on other alternatives. In these situations, the even-swap method allows you to explicitly focus on the relevant value tradeoffs to make a smart choice. The method guides you to make value tradeoffs that allow you to sequentially eliminate objectives by rendering them irrelevant to the choice and then eliminate dominated alternatives. The procedure repeats until one dominant alternative - the smart choice - is left. The even-swap method, which is a generalization of Benjamin Franklin's procedure of comparing two alternatives by weighing the pros and cons, has several desirable features. It allows one to address easier value tradeoffs first and perhaps avoid the very difficult ones, it logically addresses how much of each objective is being traded off, and it requires only the minimum number of value tradeoffs to select the smart choice. Perhaps more important, the even-swap method is intuitive because the tradeoffs are made in terms of the consequences relevant to the decision rather than requiring any mathematical calculations.