A decision-maker who wants to select a good weighting method to be applied to her/his multi-criteria decision-making problem is usually confronted with the embarrassing situation where, although there exist a variety of weighting methods, it is hard t...
A decision-maker who wants to select a good weighting method to be applied to her/his multi-criteria decision-making problem is usually confronted with the embarrassing situation where, although there exist a variety of weighting methods, it is hard to find a sound and systematic procedure or criterion to choose a pertinent one. To remedy this uncomfortable situation, the present study aims at constructing a set of evaluation criteria for weighting methods and suggesting an easy-to-apply procedure designed for the selection of a suitable weighting method for a given specific decision-making problem.
The research actually consisted of the four consecutive steps which follow.
(1) The existing weighting methods that could be found in the literature were surveyed, and their theoretical validity and usability characteristics were analysed.
(2) The desirable properties of a good weighting method were proposed to be 'practical validity', 'theoretical validity', 'easiness of application' and 'flexibility of application'. The practical validities of some methods most frequently used were experimentally tested using bootstrapping.
(3) The important environmental factors which could limit the usability of weighting methods were proposed to be 'time pressure', 'problem structure', 'number of attributes', 'measurement level of attributes', 'type of relative importance information' and 'range of attribute value'. The way how these factors limit the usability of each weighting methods were analysed.
(4) On the basis of the results obtained in the preceding steps, proposed were a practical procedure that could aid decision-makers to choose the most suitable weighting methods for their own decision-making problems. The procedure consists of the following three steps.
① Decide on the problem structure and verify environmental characteristics.
② Screen applicable ones from the pool of all weighting methods considering the environmental characteristics.
③ Select the most suitable one among the methods screened in the preceding step, considering the four desirable properties mentioned in (2).
Application of the proposed procedure to a credit scoring problem for loan agreement showed that it does selects fairly suitable and practically valid weighting methods.