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Economic Valuation and Decision Making: MCDA as a Tool for the Future

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Ecological Economics

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Abstract

Over the course of the past 50 years decisions on major infrastructure projects or projects that involve compromises between quality of environment and economic gain have been selected on the basis of cost-benefit analysis. This type of thinking masked the complexity of impact by the concept of willingness to pay and related techniques. The ecological-economic community, realising that these approaches violated the incommensurability of values principle, proposed to approach the problems of choice with the help of multicriteria decision aid tools. Over the course of several decades several tools have been developed and it is often difficult to make the right choice. This chapter presents the taxonomy of MCDA tools first proposed by Guitoni and Martel and offers several approaches to the reader. To study this subject in depth the interested reader is referred to the specialist literature, which is extensively cited in this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oxford, Queen Elizabeth House Flat 3, Banbury House 1 Staverton Road Oxfordshire, Oxford, OX2 6XH, UK

    Dr. Stanislav E. Shmelev

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  1. Dr. Stanislav E. Shmelev
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Correspondence to Stanislav E. Shmelev .

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Shmelev, S.E. (2012). Economic Valuation and Decision Making: MCDA as a Tool for the Future. In: Ecological Economics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1972-9_4

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