Multi-Criteria Gain Loss Method for Informed Decision Making

Abstract

Decision analysis is primarily a prescriptive discipline, built upon normative and descriptive foundations. In all decision making situations, an individual decision maker (DM) arrive at any decision through some conscious and unconscious processes of their brain. In a conscious decision making situation, the DM must have complete information about the problem, the criteria, the alternatives, the methods and their consequences before arriving at any decision. This scenario is known as informed decision making situation. Since, all the discrete alternative multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods relies on the preferences of the DM on objective values of the alternatives, the role of the DM is very crucial. This necessitates that the MCDM methods used by the DM in an informed decision making situation to solve a multi-criteria decision (MCD) problems must conform to the cognitive capabilities and descriptive realities of the DM.