Group decision making under multiple criteria. Methods and applications (Q1095015)

From a formal point of view, there is no difference between individual multicriteria decision making and collective decision making. In both, the objective is to construct a synthetic preference from several preferences. In collective decision making these preferences are the preferences of the individuals. In individual multicriteria decision making, they are the eventually different preferences of the unique individual according to the various criteria upon which these preferences of the unique individual are based. According to its title, this book is about two-stage aggregation procedures. In spite of the title, the book is not mainly devoted to these two-stage processes. It essentially deals with the usual theories of collective decision making, i.e., each individual participating in a decision has already defined his synthetic preference, or utility, or payoff function. In the authors' words ``(their) work is not a theoretical treatment, but rather a capsule look into the existing methods, their characteristics, and applicability. The many and varied fields of approach to group decision making are systematically classified and simplified for beginners''. The first part, entitled ``Social Choice Theory'', provides a survey of voting theory and classical social choice theory including a description of voting methods (Condorcet, Borda, Copeland, Nanson, Dogson, Kemeny...) and a statement of Arrow's theorem and of restrictive conditions guaranteeing some collective rationality (Black's single-peakedness, conditions due to Bowman and Colantoni and to Goodman and Markovitz). The second part (the longest) is about experts judgement and/or group participation. It describes several techniques such as brain storming, synectics, surveys, delphi method, interpretative structure modelling... Finally, forty pages are devoted to game theory. The book is intended for courses in engineering and management science. This explains probably that the second part is more developed than the other two. The choice of the different topics in each part may be discussed. But this is probably a matter of taste. The main interest of the book is to offer three surveys in a compact form. Concerning social choice, I prefer the coverage in the recent textbook by \textit{J. S. Kelly} [``Social choice theory - an introduction'', Springer-Verlag, Berlin (1988)]. The treatment of game theory may seem unfair in comparison with the two other topics. Finally, it should be noted that some assertions must be considered with care [for instance, on page 137 it is said that for social welfare functions independence of irrelevant alternatives and nondictatorship imply anonymity (consider the case when the collective preference is the reverse preference of some individual); it is also said that neutrality is implied by the universal domain condition (consider the case when the collective preference is some fixed preference independent of the profiles of individual preferences)].