Fundamentals of Management, 11/e

How Does the Decision Maker Weight the Criteria and Analyze Alternatives?

Steps 3, 4, and 5. In many decision-making situations, the criteria are not all equally important.6 So, the decision maker has to allocate weights to the items listed in step 2 in order to give them their relative priority in the decision (step 3). A simple approach is to give the most important criterion a weight of 10 and then assign weights to the rest against that standard. Thus, in contrast to a criterion that you gave a 5, the highest-rated factor is twice as important. The idea is to use your personal preferences to assign priorities to the relevant criteria in your decision and indicate their degree of importance by assigning a weight to each. Exhibit 4–2 lists ...