Framing effects have been shown to have dramatic impact on human decision making in many domains, in certain circumstances even driving self-detrimental behavior. Multi-stakeholder tradespace exploration (MSTSE), an emerging technique for advanced multiparty decision making for engineering systems, has displayed many benefits with regards to insight-generation and identification of mutually beneficial solutions. However, for complex problems with no solutions that are individually optimal for each stakeholder, stakeholders may still resist “compromising” from their individual preferred solutions. This occasionally drives a failure to reach agreement, despite a design space with a considerable number of feasible designs with value for all parties. This paper hypothesizes that this result may be caused in part by an unintentional framing of the initial stages of MSTSE as an individual problem, establishing an unrealistically high reference point. Theoretically, this locks stakeholders into a mindset that forces them to “compromise” down, rather than more appropriately building up mutual value from the “no agreement” alternative. This paper addresses the current literature of multi-stakeholder system design, the ramifications of framing on MSTSE, considerations for establishing a more appropriate reference point, and example techniques and visual representations for doing so. A preliminary set of experiments is described to confirm the hypothesized framing effect and to validate visual representations for mitigating its impact.
