The MACBETH Approach: Basic Ideas, Software, and an Application

MACBETH (Measuring Attractiveness by a Categorical Based Evaluation Technique) is an interactive approach to guide the construction, on a set S of stimuli, of an interval scale which quantifies the attractiveness of the elements of S in the opinion of an evaluator. The aim of this paper is to present the main ideas on which this new decision-aid approach is based, and its software. MACBETH has already been applied in several complex cases. One such case was in the first application of multicriteria analysis to the evaluation of a European structural programme, the Hainaut case, which is used to illustrate the presentation in this paper.