An extreme-point approach for obtaining weighted ratings in qualitative multicriteria decision making

Many attempts have been made in the past to obtain estimates for the weights and ratings values of a multicriteria linear utility function. In particular, the problem arises when both criteria importance and alternatives' ratings are expressed in a qualitative ordinal manner. This article proposes an extreme-point approach for obtaining the overall ratings in the presence of ordinal preferences both for the criteria importance and the alternatives' rankings. In particular it is shown that Borda's method of scores is obtained as a special case. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.