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3-minute summary of my PhD journey

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Need to make decison towards your relationship? How about a decison tree analysis ?

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Supposed you are in a long-distance relationship for some years, of course you want to be with your partner in a same city, but both of you have job in different cities, your partner shows reluctance to move to your city. What will you do? Sacrifice your job to move to another city? Is it worthy to do so? Then you need do a decision tree analysis!





If you move to another city, you need to quit your old job and find a new one, probably you can’t find a new job immediately, there may be a period that you have no income. Let’s assume you need a year to find a new job. Then the costs of moving will be the benefits of your original annual income. For your relationship, you know if you move to your partner’s city, there will be high chance of probability that both you will get married. If you don’t move, there will only be low chance of probability that you will get married. If you get married, your tax level will be lower, you share the rent and perhaps your annual income will be higher, which assume will increase 50% of annual income benefit. But there still a chance that you will not get married and you will have a very hard time due to break up. You can’t sleep well, you can’t eat well and you can’t work well, which may take you at least half a year to recover. Let’s assume the costs of break up will be the income of your half year salary. Here is the illustration of the decision tree analysis process.



Then calculation the utilities of the two decision scenarios will be :

If you move,



If you don’t move,



For example:





Then calculation results will be :



For this case, it is recommended not to move for a higher value of utility. But the results will be varied with different case background, which is highly depend on the faith or belief of you towards the relationship as well as the consequences of your decision choice.  And the assigned probability may depend on a lot factors, such as emotional factor, cultural factor, time factor, distance factor and so on. You can add these factors into account for your own model:)








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