ON DOMINANCE AND CONTEXT-DEPENDENCE IN DECISIONS INVOLVING MULTIPLE ATTRIBUTES

In decision-making involving multiple criteria or attributes, a decision maker first identifies all relevant evaluative attributes in making decisions. Then, a dominance principle is often invoked whenever applicable: whenever an option <italic>x</italic> is better than an option <italic>y</italic> in terms of some attribute and no worse than <italic>y</italic> in terms of any other attributes, <italic>x</italic> is judged to be better than <italic>y</italic>. If, however, this dominance principle is not applicable, then the decision maker determines the relative importance between the identified evaluative attributes, consults with contextual features of the options under consideration, and makes a decision. It is shown that the combination of these principles runs into problems in the presence of rationality properties, such as transitivity, and a weak continuity requirement on decisions. The paper gives examples from welfare economics, and theories of individual and group decisions.