Wikis > Decision-Making Tools > Decision matrices
The decision-making stage often deals with copious amount of information, by generation of a baseline and assessing projected impacts, which would then need to be systematically collected and displayed. This would be followed by assessment and comparison of various options to aid policy design. Tradeoffs are often inevitable in this process but it is critical to identify them and the use of decision-matrices can facilitate this process. A decision-matrix typically will display policy choices across the columns and decision criteria down the rows. Any cell in the decision matrix contains the projected outcome of the alternative assessed by reference to the column criterion.  To aid the decision-making process, each alternative in the matrix should be linked to each criterion systematically. To protect against or counter the biases of the analyst, all cells should be considered which promotes recognition and discussion of oversights and biases (Xun et al, 2010).