Analysis of the cognitive aspects of the preference elicitation process in the compensatory context: a neuroscience experiment with FITradeoff

Multi‐criteria methods and systems have been developed over many years to support decision‐making with a process of eliciting preferences. The emphasis has been on those that incorporate compensatory rationality, the characteristics of which make the process more complex. Neuroscience has offered the opportunity to capture aspects of cognition, generating insights. This paper investigates the preference elicitation process with Flexible and Interactive Tradeoff (FITradeoff), using electroencephalography and eye‐tracking applied to a sample of undergraduate and graduate students. While FITradeoff offers greater flexibility when evaluating recent advances in the area, the experiment carried out incorporates paradigms present in other methods developed for compensatory rationality. The results indicate the effect the type of predominant criterion has on cognitive effort. Moreover, a non‐linear relationship between the number of criteria and questions was found, which suggests that decision‐makers use a strategy of minimizing cognitive effort. Such findings help to direct efforts to enhance systems and methods with compensatory rationality.