EXPERIMENT ON THE USE OF MULTIPLE PREFERENCEFORMATS IN DETERMINING THE WEIGHTS OFEVALUATION CRITERIA

In multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM), decision makers (DMs) always give preferences in alternatives, criteria or decision matrices. Since the DMs may have different cultural and educational backgrounds or different values systems, they may express their preferences in different ways. This is especially the case in the cyberspace environment (Courtney 2001). In this study, the DMs are asked to express their preferences in criteria using any one of the following preference formats: preference orderings, utility values, multiplicative preference relation, selected subset, fuzzy selected subset, normal preference relation, fuzzy preference relation, linguistic terms, and pairwise comparison. In addition, the unifying methods and aggregating methods are also proposed in the paper. Using multiple preference formats provides not only convenience and accuracy in generating the final outcome, but also results in higher satisfaction levels of the DMs with both the decisionmaking process and the decision outcome. An experiment was conducted to justify the proposed approach.