If all we are doing is binary comparisons between a set of items, it seems to me that it would be sufficient to represent relative values as a binary—i.e., is item1 better, or item2?
Why do you think this is all we’re doing? We often want to know how much better some items are than others—relative values estimate this information.
You can think of relative values a lot like “advanced and scalable expected value calculations”. There are many reasons to actually know the expected value of something. If you want to do extrapolation (“The EV of one person going blind is ~0.3 QALYs/year, so the EV of 20 people going blind is probably...”), it’s often not too hard to ballpark it.
Related, businesses often use dollar approximations of the costs of very different things. This is basically a set of estimates of the value of the cost.
Why do you think this is all we’re doing? We often want to know how much better some items are than others—relative values estimate this information.
You can think of relative values a lot like “advanced and scalable expected value calculations”. There are many reasons to actually know the expected value of something. If you want to do extrapolation (“The EV of one person going blind is ~0.3 QALYs/year, so the EV of 20 people going blind is probably...”), it’s often not too hard to ballpark it.
Related, businesses often use dollar approximations of the costs of very different things. This is basically a set of estimates of the value of the cost.
I don’t think it’s all you are doing, that’s why I wrote the rest of my comment (sorry to be flippant).
The point of bringing up binary comparisons is that a table of binary comparisons is a more general representation than a single utility function.