Hilary Taylor, the director of athletics at Green Hill College, must decide whether to conduct random drug tests of student athletes. About 50% of NCAA schools have institutional drug testing programs in addition to the NCAA's drug testing program.(Charles Feinstein reports on how decision analysis was used at Santa Clara University to recommend against a mandatory drug testing program in "Deciding Whether to Test Students for Drug Use," Interfaces20, no. 3 [1990]: 80-87.)Ms. Taylor expresses payoffs in terms of cost; that is, positive dollar amounts correspond to a monetary loss. The goal is to minimize the cost. For simplicity, she ignores the wage paid to the employee who monitors the collection of the test sample and the fee that Green Hill pays the lab that conducts the test. She also ignores the cost of a true negative, even though an athlete who is not a drug user may feel that his or her privacy has been invaded by the testing procedure.Ms. Taylor assigns a zero cost to the accurate identification of a drug user and to the accurate identification of a nonuser. She assigns a cost of $1,000 to falsely accusing a nonuser and a cost of $500 to not detecting a user.Ms. Taylor's incomplete decision tree looks like this:

User 0 + Result C 3 A Nonuser $1,000 D Test 2 User $500 - Result E 4 B Nonuser 0 F 1 User $500 Don't Test G 5 Nonuser 0 H