Collaborative Decision Making

Abstract

Decision makers, dealing with complex decision problems, must often prioritize decision options or determine priorities of criteria, and, eventually, aggregate their assessments to an overall consensus group assessment. An example would be the screening of investment options, product designs, or marketing strategies. Experts in marketing, product design, and strategic planning must screen potential alternatives, which can be composed of different attributes, each having different levels. The combinations of allpossible attribute variations, such as price levels and quality of raw material, result in a large number of feasible products, which could impossibly all be analyzed before being introduced in the market. It is quite obvious that lack of information and analytic disinclination of decision makers exclude computationally intensive techniques in this early stage of decision making. Listead, the decision makers must be supported through an intuitive and easily comprehensible process to arrive at their group aggregated assessments, as discussed in Chapter 3.