A Contingency Approach to Multi-Criteria Decision-Making: A Search for Validity Through Rigor and Relevance

Enrique Mu () and Orrin Cooper ()
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Enrique Mu: Carlow University
Orrin Cooper: University of Memphis

A chapter in New Perspectives in Operations Research and Management Science, 2022, pp 499-525 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Addressing the contingent dimensions (content and context) in multi-criteria decision-making is very important to ensure the validity of a study. While this approach is widely accepted in the strategic decision-making community, it is argued here that this practice is not properly addressed and/or reported in many cases and that it must be applied in all MCDM decisions to ensure the rigor and relevance of the outcome. To explore the extent to which contingent factors are addressed in the literature, a sample of 46 MCDM group decision-making papers from a single year of publication was examined with regard to a well-known contingent dimension: group decision-making. More specifically, the following four critical variables were examined: group membership, group process, aggregation of perspectives, and group engagement. The study found that the percentage of papers that addressed these variables in a reasonable way was 23.9%, 17.4%, 26.1%, and 19.6%, respectively. These results suggest that MCDM analysts are not, for the most part, properly addressing (or reporting) group decision-making and similar contingent dimensions. For this reason, this research is a call to authors and journal editors to include and properly address all MCDM applicable contingent dimensions to improve MCDM rigor and relevance; that is, the overall validity of MCDM studies.

Keywords: Contingency dimensions; Rigor; relevance; validity; Group decision-making; MCDM (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-91851-4_19

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