Social Choice Theory and Multicriteria Decision Aiding

Many organizations face such complex and important management problems that they sometimes want their decisions to be somehow supported by a ‘scientific approach’, sometimes called a decision analysis. The analyst in charge of this preparation faces many diverse tasks: stakeholders identification, problem statement, elaboration of a list of possible actions, definition of one or several criteria for evaluating these actions, information gathering, sensitivity analysis, elaboration of a recommendation (for instance a ranking of the actions or a subset of ‘good’ actions), etc. The desire or necessity to take multiple conflicting viewpoints into account for evaluating the actions often makes this task even more difficult. In that case, we speak of multicriteria decision aiding [POM 93, ROY 85, VIN 89]. The expert must then try to synthesize the partial preferences (modeled by each criterion) into a global preference on which a recommendation can be based. This is called preference aggregation.