Handling Preferences in the "Pre-conflicting" Phase of Decision Making Processes under Multiple Criteria

Multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) literature concentrates on the concept of conflicting objectives, which is related to focusing on the need of trading off. Most approaches to eliciting preferences of the decision maker (DM) are built accordingly on contradistinguishing different attainable levels of objectives. We propose to pay attention to the non-conflicting aspects of decision making allowing the DM to express preferences as a desirable direction of consistent improvement of objectives. We show how such preference information combined with a dominance relation principle results in a Chebyshev-type scalarizing model, which can be used in early stages of decision making processes for deriving preferred solutions without trading off.