A preference ordering among various Pareto optimal alternatives

It is often necessary to choose a Pareto optimal point from a set of many. This paper introduces the concept of order of efficiency, which provides a notion that is stronger than Pareto optimality and allows us to set up a preference ordering amongst various alternatives that are Pareto optimal. This approach does not resort to setting up a ranking on the basis of an arbitrary "criterion of merit" obtained by combining the multiple decision criteria into one scalar index. Examples are cited and it is argued that using the procedure described in this paper, it is possible to rule out Pareto alternatives with "extreme components" and retain alternatives "in the middle" of the Pareto set without the help of plots or other visualization aids. This makes the approach applicable for cases where the number of criteria is very high and visualization is intractable.