A Perspective on Confidence and Its Use in Focusing Attention During
  Knowledge Acquisition
  We present a representation of partial confidence in belief and preference
that is consistent with the tenets of decision-theory. The fundamental insight
underlying the representation is that if a person is not completely confident
in a probability or utility assessment, additional modeling of the assessment
may improve decisions to which it is relevant. We show how a traditional
decision-analytic approach can be used to balance the benefits of additional
modeling with associated costs. The approach can be used during knowledge
acquisition to focus the attention of a knowledge engineer or expert on parts
of a decision model that deserve additional refinement.
