Handling a large number of preferences in a multi-level decision making process

Decision making is a process that all of us experience daily, from habitual decisions which are made with ease to more complex ones where more intensive thinking is needed. Moreover, a decision-making process can involve several persons including multiple decision makers. For example, depending on t...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor Principal: Tapia Rosero, Ana Teresa
Otros Autores: De Baets, Patrick
Formato: Tesis de Doctorado
Lenguaje:eng
Publicado: Gante de Flandes / Ghent University / 2016 2016
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Acceso en línea:http://repositorio.educacionsuperior.gob.ec/handle/28000/2553
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Sumario:Decision making is a process that all of us experience daily, from habitual decisions which are made with ease to more complex ones where more intensive thinking is needed. Moreover, a decision-making process can involve several persons including multiple decision makers. For example, depending on the decision problem, a decision process within an academic institution can involve its students, professors, administrative sta as well as the academic authorities. In the example, the participants in the decision process seem to be one of the keys regarding the complexity of the decision-making problem. Without loss of generality, two types of participants can be identi ed in a decision-making process: the regular participants and the decision makers. A regular participant is a person who is involved in the process by expressing his/her preferences regarding the decision criteria, but without deciding what the result is. A decision maker is a person who expresses his/her perspective (e.g., social, technical, nancial or environmental) and decides on the result of a decision problem. Besides the type of participants, the complexity of a decision-making problem can be increased by a large number of them. Moreover, the complexity may be further increased when it is considered that the preferences given by some participants are more relevant than others. Although the complexity is increased, a large number of participants together with the diversity of preferences (given by the regular participants) and multiple perspectives (given by the decisions makers) can contribute to make better motivated decisions. Therefore, the problem of handling the complexity of decision making in the presence of a large number of preferences and multiple perspectives is studied in this dissertation. Herein, three main research questions are addressed in a decision-making context: (i) How to handle a large number of preferences? (ii) How to identify and evaluate preferences considered being relevant from a decision maker's perspective? And (iii) How to combine preferences from multiple perspectives? Overall this dissertation contributes to the study of decision problems that involve di erent domains of knowledge, i.e. di erent perspectives given by persons with di erent areas of expertise, where it is possible to delegate the sub-tasks of decision making. For example, a decision-making problem in a multinational corporation with operations in more than one country, where the headquarters would like to take into account the opinions given by the regional (and sub-regional) organizational units and their respective customers. In this example, each regional (or sub-regional) manager may include in his/her perspective the regional constraints (e.g., cultural, environmental, nancial, among others) that are related to his/her competence area.