The value of additional information in multicriteria decision making choice problems with information imperfections

Abstract

Processing information is a key ingredient for decision making. In most decision-making cases, information is distributed across various sources that may differ in reliability and accuracy. Various sources and kinds of uncertainty are encountered in the same decision situation. “Information imperfections” is a general term that encompasses all kinds of “deficiencies” (such as uncertainty, imprecision, ambiguity, incompleteness) that may affect the quality of information at hand. In discrete multicriteria decision making, where several alternatives are assessed according to heterogeneous and conflicting criteria, information used to assess such alternatives can also be imperfect. It is rather natural, in such a context, to seek additional information to reduce these imperfections. This paper aims at extending the Bayesian model for assessing the value of additional information to multicriteria decision analysis in a context of imperfect information. A unified procedure for processing additional information has been proposed in a previous work. It leads to prior and posterior global preference relational systems. It will be extended here to include pre-posterior analysis where concepts such as the expected value of perfect information and the expected value of imperfect information are adapted to multicriteria decision making choice problems.