I may be falling prey to the curse of knowledge since I already knew about VoI when I read it but I thought How to Measure Anything (which has a chapter on VoI) was very pragmatic and accessible.
If you want to see the math for how VoI is used in practice, here are some examples, and some more, of how to do the basic quantitative work.
Good writeup, and cool tool. I may use it and/or point to it in the future.
I agree that when everything is already quantified, and you can do this. The chapter in HtMA is also fantastic. But it’s fairly rare that people have already quantified all of the relevant variables and properly explored what the available decisions are or what they would affect—and not doing so can materially change the VoI, and are far more important to do anyways.
That said, no, basic VoI isn’t hard. It’s just that the use case is fairly narrow, and the conceptual approach is incredibly useful in the remainder of cases, even those cases where actually quantifying everything or doing to math is incredibly complex or even infeasible.
I may be falling prey to the curse of knowledge since I already knew about VoI when I read it but I thought How to Measure Anything (which has a chapter on VoI) was very pragmatic and accessible.
Also, not sure if it’s actually useful or falls into the “complex quantitative tools … [that you shouldn’t use]” category but I have a basic VoI calculator at: https://www.col-ex.org/posts/value-of-information-calculator-explained/.
Good writeup, and cool tool. I may use it and/or point to it in the future.
I agree that when everything is already quantified, and you can do this. The chapter in HtMA is also fantastic. But it’s fairly rare that people have already quantified all of the relevant variables and properly explored what the available decisions are or what they would affect—and not doing so can materially change the VoI, and are far more important to do anyways.
That said, no, basic VoI isn’t hard. It’s just that the use case is fairly narrow, and the conceptual approach is incredibly useful in the remainder of cases, even those cases where actually quantifying everything or doing to math is incredibly complex or even infeasible.