Evaluating ethical responsibility in inverse decision support

Abstract

Decision makers have considerable autonomy on how they make decisions and what type of support they receive. This situation places the DSS analyst in a different relationship with the client than his colleagues who support regular MIS applications. This paper addresses an ethical dilemma in Inverse Decision Support, when the analyst supports a decision maker who requires justification for a preconceived selection that does not correspond to the best option that resulted from the professional resolution of the problem. An extended application of the AHP model is proposed for evaluating the ethical responsibility in selecting a suboptimal alternative. The extended application is consistent with the Inverse Decision Theory that is used extensively in medical decision making. A survey of decision analysts is used to assess their perspective of using the proposed extended application. The results show that 80 of the respondents felt that the proposed extended application is useful in business practices. 14 of them expanded the usability of the extended application to academic teaching of the ethics theory. The extended application is considered more usable in a country with a higher Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (TICPI) than in a country with a lower one. © 2012 Ahmad M. Kabil.