Verbal Decision Analysis: Foundations and Trends

Abstract

The primary goal of research in multiple criteria decision analysis is to develop tools to help people make more reasonable decisions. In many cases, the development of such tools requires the combination of knowledge derived from such areas as applied mathematics, cognitive psychology, and organizational behavior. Verbal Decision Analysis (VDA) is an example of such a combination. It is based on valid mathematical principles, takes into account peculiarities of human information processing system, and fits the decision process into existing organizational environments. The basic underpinnings of Verbal Decision Analysis are demonstrated by early VDA methods, such as ZAPROS and ORCLASS. New trends in their later modifications are discussed. Published applications of VDA methods are presented to support the findings.

Hybrid Approaches of Verbal Decision Analysis in the Selection of Project Management Approaches

“…The SAC (Subset Alternatives Classification) method [20] is a method for ordinal classification of a relatively small set of alternatives that need to be classified only once [23]. The method aims at presenting the minimum number of questions to the decision maker in order to reduce the time spent in the preferences elicitation task.…”

“…Also, according to [23], the SAC method works with "relative informativeness" of a vector by considering a variance, which depends on the number of classes and criteria defined, in the number of indirectly classified alternatives. This way, considering g il as a random parameter G i with an expected value MG i (ϕ i ), the representation of the variation of G i near MG i , where DG i is the variance of G i , is given by [20]:…”

The MARS Approach in the Verbal and Holistic Evaluation of the Negotiation Template

“…The key concept of the VDA approach is to allow DMs to express their evaluations and preferences in a verbal and ordinal form (for instance, using expressions such as: 'more preferable', 'less preferable', or 'equally preferable'), which seems stable and reliable according to the results of psychological experiments. Moreover, judgments provided by DMs are checked to ensure their consistency (Ashikhmin and Furems 2005;Moshkovich and Mechitov 2013). The authors define the key concepts of VDA techniques in the following way: "use language for problem description that is natural to the decision maker, implement psychologically valid measurements and preference elicitation procedures, incorporate procedures for consistency check of decision maker's preferences, procedures should be 'transparent' to the decision maker and provide explanations of the results".…”

Applying Verbal Decision Analysis to Task Allocation in Distributed Development of Software

“…According to [28], the traditional methods of VDA aimed at solving problems with a lot of alternatives and a limited number of criteria and criteria values, since they were designed for the construction of a general rule for the decision, regardless of which alternatives belonged to the real alternatives set. However, this characteristic has changed recently, and new methods that elicit the preferences based on the real alternatives to the problem have been proposed.…”