Multicriteria Decision Making as Interdisciplinary Research

Abstract

In their excellent recounting of the development of multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) from its early history to the 21st century, Koksalan et al. (2011) proposed that MCDM is both old and new. It is old because decision makers have always had to make tradeoffs with objectives when making decisions; the authors refer to Benjamin Franklin’s approach to making decisions by trading off benefits and costs during the 1700’s. However, MCDM as an important sub-field of Management Science or Operations research is rather new and began in the late 1950s. The elements of decision making fundamentally consist of the “decision”, a “decision-maker” and a “decision analysis methodology.” This is the reason that the MCDM field is inherently interdisciplinary. While applied mathematics is used for the decision quantitative analysis; the decision at hand, its content, needs to be addressed with tools of the corresponding discipline. This is further complicated because the decision topic may correspond to fields as diverse as medicine, sociology, or a variety of other fields. The multiple fields tackled by MCDM can easily be appreciated by taking a quick look at the list of articles that comprise the current IJAHP issue and noticing the variety of disciplines involved in the target decisions. Because of this, Wallenius and Wallenius (2023) argue in this issue for the MCDM profession to focus on important problems ranging from the risk of future pandemics to climate change. This need to focus on the discipline where the decision takes place is an important contingent aspect of MCDM that must be carefully considered and many times is not, in particular, by emerging scholars. This is one reason why the MCDM section of INFORMS evaluates research candidates for the MCDM Junior Best Paper Research Award, by allocating 30% value to the relevance of the decision and 20% to its potential impact on society while the remaining 50% considers the theoretical and methodological value of the MCDM analysis. That is, half the value of the research study (50%) focuses on aspects related to the decision itself (Slowinski, 2023).