# 178

Dear Uzhga-Rebrov, Galina Kuleshova

I read your paper:

A Review and Comparative Analysis of Methods for Determining Criteria Weights in MCDM Tasks Oleg

My comments

1 - In the abstract you say “: Subjective assessments of importance are transformed into numerical assessments of decision weights by applying appropriate computational procedures”.

I do not believe that computational procedures for numerical assessments are used. In most cases the estimates are subjective, and even if you use fuzzy, the only thing that you get is a crisp value of the DM estimates, nor for the reality that has no relation with personal estimates. In my opinion you cannot pretend that what the DM thinks may be transferred to the real-world, which, by the way does not need to be transitive. The FORCED transitivity of the DM is only an invention with neither mathematical nor common-sense support.

“Provided that n criteria are specified; the most important criterion is assigned a score 1 while the least important criterion is assigned a score n”

On what grounds you assign a weight for the most and least important criteria? For me it looks very arbitrary and same for RS and RR .SPC is still worse, because the DM assigns by intuition or even on ana average of intuitions the numerical preference of one criterion on other.

Can you say for instance that a football is three times more important than other, or that environment is twice the value of disposable income? Certainly, you can express your preferences of a team over a other as millions of people make around the world make, but you cannot put a value at that preference, even based on a table that pretends to represent a psychological Weber and Fechter Law, that woks with incentives, not con preferences.

3- page 3 “The advantage of this group of methods is their simplicity”

Yes, I agree, and it is also completely arbitrary and then, with no value. What if another DM or a group rank differently, who is right, the first or the second? You confirm this in your next paragraph when you speak about importance for criteria. Now. I wonder, importance related what? Cost, benefit. Environment, return on investment, etc.?

You speak about SMART which follows the same arbitrary estimators. Same for SWING, SWARA, which at least uses experts that supposedly analyze and research. Same for AHP based in pure intuition and on an absurd ratio invention, process that has been criticized since the eighties, because it is a non-sense.

4- page 6 “In the literature related to MCDM, very little attention has been paid to the problems of criteria weight determination”

I am afraid that I do not concur, for there are a myriad of researchers that from the early times of M CDM have been analyzing weights

Nolberto Munier