This study comes to grips with the industrial outranking problem, one of the major outstanding problems of current operations research and managerial decision-making. The problem, simply stated, is this: given a large but finite set of criteria, and a large but finite number of alternatives, how can the criteria be ranked in priority order, and how should the alternatives be ranked from best to worst consistent with the ordering of criteria that may be conflicting or incommensurable?

There have been many proposed solutions to the problem. Numerous empirical recipes -- among them the...