One can distinguish at least two possible types of experiments with the DSS. Experiments of the first type are aimed at testing of the DSS. The result of an experiment of the kind may be convenience or inconvenience of a particular DSS under consideration. In experiments of the second type, various generic tools often used in DSS are studied. As the result, one has to decide whether a generic tool is appropriate for users or not.
The experiment you are involved in belongs to the second type. We study the standard decision support tool: multiple pairwise comparison of two alternatives upon two criteria (or upon two blocks of several criteria).
Imagine, please, that you wish to find an additional source of income besides studying. There are some alternatives of available positions, each of which is described with (i) working time period, (ii) salary, and (iii) a time to reach a work place. Thus, each of these alternatives has its own advantages and disadvantages for you. To start with, you are asked to specify your desirable amount of salary and the times of your lectures (the working time may be partly overlapping with lectures). It is assumed that you have lectures at the same time every day. There are also different ways of reaching the work place.
We ask you to work with our software to choose a position acceptable to you taking into account the criteria listed above. The session does not require a lot of time (not more than 30 minutes). You are not put the scores for this work. However, your participation will be very important to clear some psychological aspects of multicriteria choices.
Please, note that this is not an ordinary decision support system. This is a system that has been developed for designing DSSs. Thus, the system generates the alternatives and posses questions that may not be trivial to answer.