Multicriteria Decision Making as Interdisciplinary Research

In their excellent recounting of the development of multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) from its early history to the 21st century, Koksalan et al. (2011) proposed that MCDM is both old and new. It is old because decision makers have always had to make tradeoffs with objectives when making decisions; the authors refer to Benjamin Franklin’s approach to making decisions by trading off benefits and costs  during the 1700’s. However, MCDM as an important sub-field of Management Science or Operations research is rather new and began in the late 1950s. The elements of decision making fundamentally consist of the “decision”, a “decision-maker” and a “decision analysis methodology.” This is the reason that the MCDM field is inherently interdisciplinary.