Becoming the Economist of Your Own Life: The Decision Science Behind PFR

At Personal Finance Reimagined (PFR), we believe lifelong wealth and well-being come not just from having information—but from making decisions well. While the information age has made data abundant, it has paradoxically increased uncertainty. The future is more complex and unknowable than ever before. Yet our brains still make decisions as if data were scarce, misfiring in an age of overload. What is now scarce is attention—and with it, the clarity to act wisely.

This is why decision-making must evolve. Robyn Dawes showed that valid predictions require only a few trusted variables. Thomas Saaty built the math—through the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)—to help humans weigh those variables with rigor and consistency. Together, they offered a way to navigate uncertainty that aligns with how we naturally think.

PFR builds on their work to offer education, training, and patented tools that help people and organizations apply a consistent, repeatable decision process—whether choosing a college, managing life transitions, planning for financial health, or making business decisions. In a world where attention is scarce and decisions are high-stakes, we help people make better choices—on purpose, and for a lifetime.

The Dawes-Saaty Decision Framework

Robyn Dawes, a behavioral psychologist who taught at the University of Oregon and Carnegie Mellon University, challenged conventional wisdom in statistical modeling. He showed that people could make remarkably accurate predictive judgments using what he called “improper linear models”—simple, structured frameworks that combine relevant predictors with judgmental weights. These models do not require training data or machine learning—they require clarity of thought and attention to what matters.

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman summarized the importance of Dawes’s insight this way:

“The immediate implication of Dawes’s work deserves to be widely known: you can make valid statistical predictions without prior data about the outcome that you are trying to predict. All you need is a collection of predictors that you can trust to be correlated with the outcome.”

From: Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

Thomas Saaty, who taught at the University of Pittsburgh, brought mathematical depth to human judgment through the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Grounded in matrix algebra and eigenvector theory, AHP enables people to structure decisions based on pairwise comparisons—a format aligned with our evolutionary cognitive strengths. It transforms intuitive judgment into analytically sound priorities across multiple criteria.

Jeff Hulett, founder of Personal Finance Reimagined, emphasizes the importance of Saaty’s work in empowering individual decision-makers:

“Machine learning predicts the crowd. AHP helps you outsmart it—by elevating your distinct perspective into a system no one else can replicate.” 

Together, Dawes and Saaty gave us a roadmap: identify what matters, weigh it clearly, and consistently apply those weights to real-world alternatives. Their work remains underutilized in everyday life—but when applied, it empowers individuals to navigate complexity with confidence.

This stands in stark contrast to how most traditional personal finance education is structured. Conventional methods focus first on gathering detailed information about financial products or choices—mortgages, loans, tuition costs—with the hope that, somehow, this knowledge alone will lead to good decisions. We flip that script 180 degrees. In today’s world, detailed information is easy to access—one good GenAI prompt can retrieve a wide range of available facts. But GenAI cannot resolve the uncertainty that comes with incomplete or unknowable future outcomes—that is where human judgment must lead. That is why our approach at Personal Finance Reimagined is decision-first. We teach students not just how to prompt GenAI effectively, but how to use a consistent, repeatable decision-making process to evaluate alternatives and achieve confident, high-stakes outcomes. This method is supported by patented technology that operationalizes the wisdom of Dawes and Saaty.

The Economics of Better Decisions

Why is this relevant to personal finance and economics?

At its core, economics is the study of decision-making under uncertainty and scarcity. Scarcity forces individuals to prioritize—but it is incentives that shape how they prioritize. Every personal finance decision—whether choosing a college, buying a car, or planning for retirement—rests on assumptions about an uncertain future. You might buy a car based on today’s lifestyle, only to find that a growing family or a new job changes what you need. Consumers operate under constraints, such as time, money, energy, attention, legal requirements, and local customs. Plus, every decision involves tradeoffs under incomplete information. Economics models these tradeoffs through utility functions and demand curves, but those models are only meaningful when grounded in real, evolving preferences. Utility is not abstract—it is personal. And personal utility is guided by the incentives and constraints we face, which direct how we value our limited resources over time.

This challenge has only intensified over the past half-century. Since the time of Dawes and Saaty, data has exploded in availability—yet the uncertainty of future outcomes has grown just as rapidly. Rapid technological change, volatile labor markets, and global complexity have made long-term clarity more elusive than ever. In this environment, the Dawes-Saaty framework is indispensable. It provides a structured, human-centered approach for navigating complexity and making sound decisions when attention is scarce and the path forward is unclear.

Their work helps individuals do what economists often assume they already do: act according to well-formed preferences. Rather than prescribe decisions, Dawes and Saaty offer tools to build and adapt personal utility models—reflecting values that evolve with time and circumstance. In doing so, they make rationality both accessible and dynamic. Traditionally, economics has only provided a rearview mirror, suggesting how people developed and operated their utility only AFTER purchase and related decisions have been made. That is what we have changed. Today, with the help of the Dawes-Saaty framework, we put the tools of economics into people's hands to help them understand their utility and make utility-optimizing decisions. More than a method for better decisions, their legacy empowers people to become economists of their own lives.

Decision Technology for the Information Age

At PFR, we bring this science to life through Definitive Choice—a smartphone-based platform built on the Dawes-Saaty framework. This technology enables anyone—students, professionals, families—to:

• Define and rank their decision criteria

• Make pairwise comparisons across options

• Reveal the best-fit choice based on their priorities

Rather than relying on guesswork or external rankings, individuals generate their own decision weightings—creating transparent, repeatable logic that supports both one-time choices and lifelong decision habits. Advances in smartphone user experience design enable the elegant mathematics to quietly operate in the background. The decision-maker experiences an intuitive interface guiding them through a process designed to inspire confidence and accurately reveal their individual judgments.

The value of this approach is especially clear when stakes are high and outcomes are uncertain. For example, when choosing between investment options, job offers, healthcare plans, or college paths, individuals face incomplete information and high emotional load. People's responses to uncertainty and emotion are incredibly diverse. Also, each person faces unique and evolving environmental constraints. That is where structure beats instinct. With tools grounded in the Dawes-Saaty framework, individuals do not just make good choices—they gain insight into how they make them. With the right framework and tools, the decision-making process today not only guides the current decision but also provides training to enhance future decisions.

A Path to Confidence, Not Perfection

PFR’s mission is to democratize this decision science, making it accessible and practical for real people navigating real life. We teach this model in high schools and universities. We apply it in financial coaching and our CFO services. And we embed it in technologies that scale decision-making power without overwhelming the individual.

In a world flooded with noise and complexity, we do not promise clairvoyance. What we promise is clarity of choice—a way to see your options, weigh your values, and act with confidence. That is the essence of being your own best economist.

Afterword about Robyn Dawes and Thomas Saaty

The observant reader may have noticed that Dawes and Saaty were both working at universities in the same city (Pittsburgh) at the same time (the 1970s) while they both pursued the foundations for the Dawes-Saaty framework. Interestingly, there is no evidence that these two high-powered academics ever met or collaborated. They do not cite each other's work, plus there is no evidence they ever attended the same conferences. After almost half a century, PFR is honored to make a long-overdue introduction!