Of. Morera et Dv. Budescu, A PSYCHOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF THE DIVIDE-AND-CONQUER PRINCIPLE IN MULTICRITERIA DECISION-MAKING, Organizational behavior and human decision processes (Print), 75(3), 1998, pp. 187-206
Citations number
41
Categorie Soggetti
Psychology, Applied",Management,"Psychology, Social
The principle of ''Divide and Conquer'' (DAC) suggests that: (1) compl
ex decision problems should be decomposed into smaller, more manageabl
e parts and (2) these smaller parts should be logically aggregated to
derive an overall value for each alternative. Typically, decomposition
al procedures have been compared to holistic evaluations that require
decision makers to simultaneously consider all of the relevant attribu
tes in the evaluation of the objects under consideration. These compar
isons between decompositional and holistic judgments have primarily us
ed a variant of Multiattribute Utility Theory (MAUT). We presented a g
eneral experimental framework that allows for a more extensive assessm
ent of the DAC principle, as well as the effects of decision complexit
y on both holistic and decompositional procedures. We illustrate this
approach with a study that uses the Simple Multiattribute Rating Techn
ique with Swing Weights (SMARTS; Edwards & Barren, 1994) and the Analy
tic Hierarchy Process (AHP; Saaty, 1980), We report data comparing the
convergent validity (e.g the agreement between decompositional and ho
listic strategies) and the temporal stability for decompositional and
holistic judgments on a variety of dependent measures. Decision comple
xity did not significantly affect the correspondence between decomposi
tional and holistic judgments for both SMARTS and ARP judgments. Resul
ts from an ordinal measure of temporal stability indicated the DAC pri
nciple was violated for the AHP judgments. For a linear measure of tem
poral stability, trends in the data indicated that the predicted effec
ts of decision complexity on the DAC principle was violated for the SM
ARTS judgments. (C) 1998 Academic Press.