Interactive Multicriteria Methods in Portfolio Decision Analysis

Decision Analysis is a constructive, learning process. This is particularly true of Portfolio Decision Analysis (PDA) where the number of elicitation judgements is typically very large and the alternatives under consideration are a combinatorial set and so cannot be listed and examined explicitly. Consequently, PDA is to some extent an interactive process. In this chapter we discuss what form that interactivity might take, discussing first of all how the process of asking for judgements should be staged and managed, and secondly what assumptions should be made about the substantive value models which the analyst assumes. To make the discussion concrete, we present two interactive procedures based on extended dominance concepts which assume linear additive and concave piecewise-linear additive value functions, respectively.