The Value of Information (VoI) analysis typically assesses information opportunities to manage uncertainty. The VoI is traditionally estimated using the expected monetary value (EMV), which overlooks the decision maker's (DM) attitude towards upsides and downsides. In this study, we assess the VoI for DMs with different attitudes, under different levels of information reliability. We define attitude to be as: neutrality to upsides and downsides, aversion to downside risk, and willingness to exploit upside potential. We applied a simple and flexible formula, which incorporates EMV with lower and upper semi-deviations from a benchmark, to quantify downside risk and upside potential. We determined VoI using many uncertain scenarios to maintain interactions between parameters instead of deterministically isolating the uncertainty under analysis. To accelerate analysis and reduce computational costs, we used a set of candidate production strategies optimized for extremely different scenarios. Our case study was the UNISIM-I-D, a benchmark reservoir model with a key structural uncertainty affecting production strategy selection. We used an appraisal well as an information source, and four hypothetical DMs with different attitudes. Our results showed that these DMs value information differently, that one DM may decide to acquire information while another may not, for the same situation. In our case study, information reduced downside risk but did not increase upside potential, meaning that information was more valuable to risk-averse DMs (which was up to 20 times higher), and less valuable to DMs exclusively focused on maximizing upsides.
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