Assessment of Criteria-rich Rankings for Decision Makers

Decision making based on a criteria-rich ranking is a difficult issue for decision makers. It is desirable to have the decisions based on the results of quantitative and analytical studies. On the other hand, by their very nature, many such decisions have political aspects, whose subtleties are difficult to be captured by quantitative approaches alone. In this respect, evaluating the entities by generating indices and the subsequent ranking of the entities with respect to those indices is a common practice. While recognizing the qualitative aspects of such decision making, in order to support and guide the policymaking process, we develop analytical tools to assist the process. We carefully delineate our models to be limited only to the provable quantitative properties of the available objective data based on an environmental sustainability index, as a common used application. However, such data are processed into more meaningful statements concerning the available options.