Ordinal criteria in stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis (SMAA)

We suggest a method for providing descriptive information about the acceptability of decision alternatives in discrete co-operative group decision-making problems. The new SMAA-O method is a variant of the stochastic multi-criteria acceptability analysis (SMAA). SMAA-O is designed for problems where criteria information for some or all criteria is ordinal; that is, experts (or decision-makers) have ranked the alternatives according to each (ordinal) criterion. Considerable savings can be obtained if rank information for some or all the criteria is sufficient for making decisions without significant loss of quality. The approach is particularly useful for group decision making when the group can agree on the use of an additive decision model but only partial preference information, or none at all, is available. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.