Social Choice and Multicriterion Decision-Making [antikvár]

Introduction The current models used in operations research for the multicriterion ranking of a finite set of alternatives often lack firm (mathematical) foundations. This book intends to derive, from the lessons of social choice theory, possible foundations for multicriterion models effective for one type of decision frequently occurring in industry. Consider a large number of alternatives and a large number of criteria, where "large" means greater than four and less than, say, five hundred. Suppose that each criterion ranks the alternatives according to its weak ordering, from the best to the worst one. Our decision problem consists of ranking the alternatives from the best to the worst according to a nontrivial weak ordering that is a legitimate synthesis of the criteria. We call this problem the industrial outranking problem. Since the publication of Arrow's impossibihty theorem [1951] and Black's work, summarized in his book [1958], much effort has been spent on the analysis and rationahza-tion of committee decision-making. Noncontroversial progress in the theory of social choice and in committee decision techniques has come from the study of strategic voting (see, for instance, Gibbard [1973] and Satterthwaite [1975]) and from what has been called implementation (see, for instance. Fine and Fine [1974]). There has been