Intro to Multi-Criteria Decision-Making.
In business, government and everyday life, decisions involving multiple criteria are the most difficult to make and yet they are often the most crucial.
Identifying the criteria relevant to the decision being made and determining their relative importance usually requires both expert judgement and specialised techniques. (In essence, this is what 1000Minds’ decision processes are designed to assist with.)
Consider the example of deciding which job applicants to hire. Here, identifying the relevant criteria is likely to be relatively straight-forward. For most jobs the criteria would include, amongst others, Qualifications, References and Social Skills.
The hard bit, though, is determining the relative importance of the criteria so that when the applicants for the job are assessed according to the criteria, they are ranked from best to worst, or at least the best applicant is identified.
In the table below, for example, whether Peter is ‘better’ than Fran depends on whether Qualifications is more important than Social Skills, or vice versa (notice that Peter and Fran are the same with respect to References).
| Criterion |
Applicant |
| |
Peter |
Fran |
| Qualifications |
‘good’ |
‘poor’ |
| References |
‘average’ |
‘average’ |
| Social Skills |
‘poor’ |
‘good’ |
Clearly, this issue of determining the relative importance of the criteria would be much more complicated if instead of only three criteria and two candidates (as above) there were, say, five criteria and 50 candidates.
A natural approach is to represent the relative importance of the criteria in terms of ‘point values’ or ‘weights’ via a Points System (also known as a ‘Scoring’, ‘Linear’ or ‘Point-Count’ system, or, more formally in the MCDM academic literature, as an ‘additive multiple criteria value model’).
Points Systems are used in a wide variety of applications, and their point values (‘weights’) are determined (sometimes known as ‘scored’) using a variety of scoring methods.
Naturally, due to the ubiquity of Multi-Criteria Decision-Making, in addition to this site (which, as noted earlier, is intended to have a practical and user-oriented focus), several groups and societies and many books and journals are also available.