A Descriptive Approach to Multiple-Criteria Decision Making

Certain concepts from multivariate statistical analysis are applied to problems in multiple-criteria decision making. The aim of this approach is to identify basic relationships and conflicts between the available decision alternatives and between criteria. If these aspects can be clearly identified and conveyed to the responsible decision maker, he may well be in a position to make an intelligent selection of a course of action, without the need for formal utility analysis, computation of Pareto optimal sets, etc. Two appropriate multivariate statistical techniques are introduced to illustrate the approach, and each technique is applied to two sample problems.