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Multiple Criteria Decision Making

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Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science

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Introduction

Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) refers to making decisions in the presence of multiple, usually conflicting, objectives. Multiple criteria decision problems pervade almost all decision situations ranging from common household decisions to complex strategic and policy level decisions in corporations and governments. Prior to the development of MCDM as a discipline, such problems have been traditionally addressed as single-criterion optimization problems by (i) deriving a composite measure of the objectives and optimizing it, or (ii) by choosing one of the objectives as the main decision objective for optimization and solving the problem by requiring an acceptable level of achievement in each of the other objectives. MCDM as a discipline was founded on two key concepts of human behavior, introduced and explored in detail by Herbert Simon in the 1950s: satisficing and bounded rationality (Simon 1957). The two are intertwined because satisficing involves finding...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Management Science and Systems, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, 325D Jacobs Management Center, 14260-4000, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Ramaswamy Ramesh & Stanley Zionts

Authors
  1. Ramaswamy Ramesh
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  2. Stanley Zionts
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Correspondence to Ramaswamy Ramesh .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Saul I. Gass

  2. Robert H. Smith School of Business and Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Michael C. Fu

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Ramesh, R., Zionts, S. (2013). Multiple Criteria Decision Making. In: Gass, S.I., Fu, M.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1153-7_653

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1153-7_653

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-1137-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-1153-7

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