One approach to regulating private siting decisions is by setting standards on the impacts of large constructed facilities. Theoretical structures of preferences for and among preferences, however, lead to implications which are sometimes overlooked in standard setting. Further, a central issue is that the objective function describing societal preferences is uncertain. Analytically including objective function uncertainty in standard setting allows information from several sources to be quantitatively coalesced, allows allocation decisions for investment in preference assessment to be quantitatively analyzed, and leads to speculations on the handling of temporal changes in preference
