Group Decision Making under Multiple Criteria

Book excerpt: This monograph is intended for an advanced undergraduate or graduate course of engineering and management science. as well as for persons in business. industry. military or in any field. who want an introductory and a capsule look into the methods of group decision making under multiple criteria. This is a sequel to our previous works entitled "Multiple Objective Decision Making--Methods and Applications (No. 164 of the Lecture Notes). and "Multiple Attribute Decision Making--Methods and Applications (No. 186 of the Lecture Notes). Moving from a single decision maker (the consideration of Lecture Notes 164 and 186) to a multiple decision maker setting introduces a great deal of complexity into the analysis. The problem is no longer the selection of the most preferred alternative among the nondominated solutions according to one individual's (single decision maker's) preference structure. The analysis is extended to account for the conflicts among different interest groups who have different objectives. goals. and so forth. Group decision making under multiple criteria includes such diverse and interconnected fields as preference analysis. utility theory. social choice theory. committee decision theory. theory of voting. game theory. expert evaluation analysis. aggregation of qualitative factors. economic equilibrium theory. etc; these are simplified and systematically classified for beginners. This work is to provide readers with a capsule look into the existing methods. their characteristics. and applicability in the complexity of group decision making.