Lecture
Forming and choosing the preference rules embedded in a decision-making strategy remains the responsibility of the decision makers (DMs); however, there are additional aspects that must be taken into account in this process.
Among the conditions that must additionally be taken into account when forming a strategy for selecting alternatives and choosing the final one from among them, one should mention, for example, the condition of making decisions on many criteria simultaneously.
The need for them arises when alternatives are described by several parameters that are important to the DM when choosing among alternatives (for example, profit, costs, time).
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In psychology, these parameters are called attributes of alternatives, and the tasks of selecting alternatives based on several attributes are themselves called multi-attribute (multi-attributive) decision-making problems. In economics and mathematics, instead of the term «attribute», the terms «parameters» and «features» are used, and the tasks of searching for alternatives based on the values of several of them are called multi-criteria decision-making problems.
Evaluating and comparing alternatives, i.e., making a decision on choosing an alternative, requires processing a large amount of information, which forces this process to be simplified, for example, by folding several partial criteria, applied to individual parameters and features of the alternatives, into one general criterion, and by using various heuristic preference rules used to screen out unsuitable alternatives and select the final decisions (alternatives).
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The transition from a multi-criteria decision-making problem to a single-criterion one can be ensured by:
Practice has singled out two groups of rules that ensure the transition from a multi-criteria evaluation of alternatives to a single-criterion one — compensation strategies and elimination strategies.
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