Distributed multi-criteria decision making and the role of the participants in the process

Distributed decision making occurs when a decision making authority delegates certain steps in the decision process to special committees or to lower authorities. The assessment of the alternatives under certain technical, ecological and economic criteria, for instance, is frequently entrusted to expert committees. The weighing of the criteria and the final evaluation of the alternatives, however, are usually felt to be the responsibility of the decision making authority. A thought experiment, based on the quality assessment of academic research in the Netherlands, demonstrates that the weighing of the criteria in the absence of immediate context is feasible, provided that there is a uniform scale for the assessment of the alternatives. The quality cards for secondary schools in the Netherlands show that the interpretation of judgemental data remains problematic if the context of the assessment has not clearly been specified. In distributed multi-criteria decision making, the selection of the information to be transmitted between decision makers and experts (the original raw data only, the judgemental data only, or both) is a non-trivial issue.