Dominance and ranking issues applying interval techniques in pre-negotiations for services

The study looks at the application of preference programming approaches and techniques for decision support during prenegotiations over services. In hierarchical decision analysis models the need for multi-attribute evaluation techniques that may incorporate uncertainties directly in the modeling phase has resulted in the use of the 'interval' approach. With such an approach, preference judgments are presented as ranges including all possible value estimates. This paper reports the results of applying an interval preference programming approach and technique in decision support scenarios for reasoning during pre-negotiations over services. The aim has been to critically evaluate the approach and establish its applicability for ranking multi-dimensional service offers. Our experimental results using interval SMART, in pre-negotiation decision making scenarios, showed that while the dominance relations among alternatives remained unchanged following the introduction of uncertainty intervals, the rank order and dominance relations of the alternatives may vary as a result of the addition or dropping of new alternatives with inferior values.