Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis: Limitations, Pitfalls,and Practical Difficulties

摘要

The 2002 Winter Olympics women's figure skating competition is used as a casernstudy to illustrate some of the limitations, pitfalls, and practical difficulties of Multi-CriteriarnDecision Analysis (MCDA). The paper compares several widely used models for synthesizingrnthe multiple attributes into a single aggregate value. The various MCDA models can providernconflicting rankings of the alternatives for a common set of information even under states ofrncertainty. Analysts involved in MCDA need to deal with the following challenging tasks: (1)rnselecting an appropriate analysis method, and (2) properly interpreting the results. An additionalrntrap is the availability of software tools that implement specific MCDA models that can beguilernthe user with quantitative scores. These conclusions are independent of the decision domain andrnthey should help foster better MCDA practices in many fields including systems engineeringrntrade studies.