The effect of varying value trees on multiattribute evaluations

Borcherding, Katrin; Winterfeldt, Detlof von

doi:10.1016/0001-6918(88)90052-2

Cited by 48 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Objectives hierarchies define the variety of concerns and the aims that decision makers wish to achieve. The hierarchy is the basis for the evaluation, guiding the search for information, influencing the comparison of alternatives and how preferences are elicited (Borcherding and von Winterfeldt, 1988).…”

Section: Multi-criteria Decision Analysis (Mcda)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…S-1 in the SM). All splitting bias experiments reported differences between the split and unsplit objectives' weights (Weber et al, 1988, Borcherding and von Winterfeldt, 1988, Pöyhönen and Hämäläinen, 1998, Hämäläinen and Alaja, 2008.…”

Section: Biases Related To the Objectives Hierarchymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Location of the objective: Experiments show that an objective receives more weight, using hierarchical weighting, if it is presented higher in the hierarchy 2 (Borcherding and von Winterfeldt, 1988, Pöyhönen and Hämäläinen, 2000, Jacobi and Hobbs, 2007. The phenomenon has been explained by the "anchorand-adjust" heuristic in which the participants start with an equal allocation of weights to each objective as anchors and then adjust the weights insufficiently (Jacobi and Hobbs, 2007).…”

Section: Number Of Objectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Are objectives hierarchy related biases observed in practice? A meta-analysis of environmental and energy applications of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis

Marttunen

Belton

Lienert

2018

European Journal of Operational Research

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Procedural and behavioural biases have received little attention in recent Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) research. Our literature review shows that most research on biases was done 15-30 years ago.This study focuses on biases that are introduced at an early stage of MCDA when building objectives hierarchies and their effect on the weights. The main objective is to investigate whether prior findings regarding such biases, which were mostly based on laboratory experiments, can be found in real-world applications. We conducted a meta-analysis of the objectives hierarchies and weight elicitation procedures in 61 environmental and energy MCDA cases. Relationships between the structural characteristics of the objectives hierarchy and assigned objectives' weights were analysed with statistical tests. Our main research questions were: (i) how does hierarchy size and structure affect the objectives' weights? (ii) how are weights distributed across economic, social and environmental objectives? (iii) is there support for the equalising bias? Our findings are mostly aligned with earlier research and suggest that the hierarchy structure and content can substantially influence weight distributions. For example, hierarchical weighting seems to be sensitive to the asymmetry bias, which can occur when a hierarchy has branches that differ in the number of sub-objectives. We found no evidence for the equalising bias. We highlight issues deserving more attention when developing objectives hierarchies and eliciting weights.The research demonstrates the potential to use meta-analysis, which has not previously been used in this way in the MCDA field, to learn from a collection of applications.

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Section: Multi-criteria Decision Analysis (Mcda)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Biases Related To the Objectives Hierarchymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Number Of Objectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Are objectives hierarchy related biases observed in practice? A meta-analysis of environmental and energy applications of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis

Marttunen

Belton

Lienert

2018

European Journal of Operational Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The structure itself has also a significant effect on the outcome of the decision process (Borcherding and Von Winterfeldt, 1988;Brugha, 1998). Although the initial activities of analytical decision making are usually considered as the most important, valuable and also difficult steps (Von Winterfeldt and Fasolo, 2009) the questions how to derive a complete list of criteria and how to reveal the latent structure of such a list does not receive much attention within the MCDM literature.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At the same time, most methods for decomposing and structuring decision problems have been criticized for being "artistic" and for lacking methodical accuracy (Von Winterfeldt, 1980). Although some researchers expressed their optimism that decision structuring will advance from art to science quite a while ago (Borcherding and Von Winterfeldt, 1988), there has been only little progress towards this goal.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%