A family of dominance rules for multiattribute decision making under uncertainty

Multiattribute decision-making involves choosing from a set of alternatives each of which is evaluated along multiple criteria that reflect the dimensions of interest to the goals and values of the decision-maker. Dominance-based decision-making narrows down the focus of the decision to the Pareto optimal set. The elimination of dominated alternatives is a compelling principle of rationality since each dominated alternative is logically inferior to its dominating alternative, given the criteria of evaluation. One kind of uncertainty in multiattribute decision making arises out of noisy or inaccurate criteria evaluations. The application of the principle of dominance is not quite rational if the criteria evaluations are known to be noisy. In this paper, we see how dominance-based decision-making can be applied to multiattribute decision-making problems with uncertainty due to noisy criteria values. In particular it will be shown that, for bounded uncertainty it is possible to produce the smallest sufficient subset that is guaranteed to contain all of the nondominated alternatives, and the largest necessary subset that contains only nondominated alternatives. For unbounded uncertainty, we will see how these notions of sufficiency and necessity can be adapted to varying degrees of probabilistic assurances desired by the decision-maker, and that the varying degrees of user assurance map naturally to a family of dominance rules.