Ranking alternatives from the decision maker's preferences: An approach based on utility and the notion of marginal action

This paper proposes an operational approach (based on marginal actions) to specify multi-attribute utility functions, which allows us to easily rank alternatives from criteria relevant to the manager, the customer or any other decision maker without heuristic remedies, imprecision or loss of generality. Marginal actions are fictitious alternatives which play a key role in preference analyses as a tool recently introduced for the ranking treatment of decision tables. As usual in multi-attribute value theory, preferential independence is assumed. A practical large-scale case in the textile industry to rank commercial fabrics – characterized by seven quality factors – is developed.