This paper discusses the main ideas of a new approach to discrete multi‐criteria comparison and choice from a small set of alternatives and its implementation as the Intelligent Decision Support System (IDSS) UniComBOS. The approach has been developed within the Verbal Decision Analysis paradigm. While seeking to use psychologically correct information on a decision maker's (DM's) preferences, the approach allows to take into account the individual DM's ability to deal with multi‐criteria alternatives. This is facilitated by a special graphical user interface, using colour differentiation of preferences, which assists a DM in making comparisons and provides the possibility for additional checks on the consistency of her/his answers. As in most multi‐criteria decision‐making aids, multi‐criteria descriptions of the alternatives are decomposed into their parts upon the least possible number of criteria (‘units’). The DM makes pair‐wise comparison starting from single‐criterion ‘units’, and then the number of criteria in a ‘unit’ is incremented one‐by‐one, until either the best alternative is found by the newly introduced rule of U‐Dominance, or it is obvious that the comparison of the given multi‐criteria ‘units’ poses a great challenge to the DM. In the latter case, the system would not be able to find the single best alternative, but it will indicate a set of alternatives that are incomparable with each other and that are preferable for DM in comparison to any alternative not included in this set. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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This paper is devoted to a laboratory study of human behavior in a multi-criteria choice problem. The specific feature of the experimental study is the creation of an individually adjusted instance of a general task for each subject in accordance with his/her preferences over each criterion. Human behavior is studied in a specially constructed choice situation based on the decomposition of the alternatives of a multi-criteria problem. The procedure is based on multiple steps of pair-wise comparisons involving only some (two or three) of the original components of the alternatives. Abilities of subjects to use such comparisons and to answer the questions in a logical way are tested. The experiment was carried out in two countries: Finland and Russia.