A MODEL FOR LINGUISTIC PARTIAL INFORMATION IN DECISION-MAKING PROBLEMS

A model is proposed for dealing with decision-making problems in which the decision maker has a vague (linguistically assessed) and incomplete information about results and external factors (a quite usual situation in real decision cases). It is assumed here that utilities are evaluated in a term set of labels and the incomplete information is supposed to be a partial linguistic assignment of probability with values on a term set of linguistic likelihoods. The first step is to discuss a well-fitted interpretation of that model. After that, basic decision rules based on fuzzy risk intervals are developed. Additionally the suitability of considering a hierarchical structure (represented by a tree) for the set of utility labels is analyzed. (C) 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.