Let F be a family of criteria built for assessing a comprehensive preference model on a set A of actions (or alternatives). Let us put ourselves in a decision aiding perspective, and with the hypothesis where dependencies can exist between some criteria of F. We start (see Sect. 2.1) by specifying what the assertion ‘there exist dependencies between some criteria of F’ means (Def. 1). Then we consider two usual forms of dependencies (see Sect. 2.2). In Section 3, we attempt to give basic principles to answer the question: how to put into light dependencies if there exist some, and how to make them intelligible for stakeholders in a decision process? We define three types of situations particularly worthy of interest, because they are clearly intelligible and easy to surround. In the next section, we examine the possibilities provided by a certain number of aggregation models for taking explicitly into account dependencies. We particularly bring to the fore the possibilities and limits of Choquet integral (see Sect. 4.2). All along the paper, examples are introduced in order to illustrate the intention.
