Building additive utilities for Multi-Group Hierarchical Discrimination: The MHDIS method

The discrimination problem is of major interest in fields such as environmental management, human resources management, production management, finance, marketing, medicine, etc. For decades this problem has been studied from a multivariate statistical point of view. Recently the possibilities of new approaches have been explored, based mainly on mathematical programming. This paper follows the methodological framework of multicriteria decision aid (MCDA), to propose a new method for multigroup discrimination based on a hierarchical procedure (Multi-Group Hierarchical Discrimination-M.H.DIS). The performance of the M.H.DIS method is evaluated along with eight real world case studies from the fields of finance and marketing. A comparison is also performed with other MCDA methods.