Some Thoughts on MCDM: Myths and Ideas

Decision making is a most important function and process of management. It is one of the most pervasive problems of management and a pervasive problem in general. Multiple criteria decision making is an approach to decision making. It is the making of decisions taking into consideration multiple conflicting objectives. How do we make decisions? What is involved? There are many simple paradigms, and until recently about all that could be said was that you should list the alternatives, score them on certain dimensions, and then somehow aggregate the scores, and choose an alternative. Unfortunately, many excellent decision makers simply choose an alternative, based on instinct, intuition, or feel. Then they go on. Though that is fine in many cases; in some cases it is not. In this paper I consider some myths of decision making. I then propose some steps that we, as decision analysts and scientists, should consider taking to try to sensitize decision makers to thinking more about their decisions and making better decisions.