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What Is Legitimate Decision Support?

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Intelligent Decision Support Systems

Part of the book series: Multiple Criteria Decision Making ((MCDM))

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Abstract

Decision support is the science and associated practice that consist in providing recommendations to decision-makers facing problems, based on the available theoretical knowledge and empirical data. Although this activity is often seen as being mainly concerned with solving mathematical problems and conceiving algorithms, it is essentially an empirical and socially framed activity, where interactions between clients and analysts, and between them and concerned third parties, play a crucial role. Since the 80s, two concepts have structured the literature devoted to analyzing this aspect of decision support: validity and legitimacy. Whereas validity is focused on the interactions between the client and the analyst, legitimacy refers to the broader picture: the organizational context, the overall problem situation, the environment, culture, and history. Despite its unmistakable importance, this concept has not received the attention it deserves in the literature in operational research and decision support. The present chapter aims at filling this gap. For that purpose, we review the literature in other disciplines (mainly philosophy and political science) that is demonstrably relevant to elaborate a concept of legitimacy useful in decision support contexts. Based on this review, we propose a general theory of legitimacy, adapted to decision support contexts, encompassing the relevant contributions we found in the literature. According to this general theory, a legitimate decision support intervention is one for which the decision support provider produces a justification that satisfies two conditions: (i) it effectively convinces the decision support provider’s interlocutors (effectiveness condition) and (ii) it is organized around the active elicitation of as many and as diverse counter-arguments as possible (truthfulness condition). Despite its conceptual simplicity, legitimacy, understood in this sense, is a very exacting requirement, opening ambitious research avenues that we delineate.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CNRS-LAMSADE, PSL, Université Paris Dauphine, Paris, France

    Yves Meinard & Alexis Tsoukiàs

Authors
  1. Yves Meinard
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  2. Alexis Tsoukiàs
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexis Tsoukiàs .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics and Business, University of Catania, Catania, Italy

    Salvatore Greco

  2. MICS Laboratory, CentraleSupélec, University of Paris-Saclay, Gif sur Yvette, France

    Vincent Mousseau

  3. Institute of Computing Sciences, Poznan University of Technology, Poznan, Poland

    Jerzy Stefanowski

  4. School of Production Engineering and Management, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece

    Constantin Zopounidis

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Meinard, Y., Tsoukiàs, A. (2022). What Is Legitimate Decision Support?. In: Greco, S., Mousseau, V., Stefanowski, J., Zopounidis, C. (eds) Intelligent Decision Support Systems . Multiple Criteria Decision Making. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96318-7_11

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