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326 Decisions involving groups of individuals
Discussion questions
(1) A supermarket chain intends to open a new shop near Sheffield,
in England, next year. Four possible locations have been identified:
(i) Moortop (Site A); (ii) Silver Hill (Site B); (iii) Cheston Common
(Site C); and (iv) the River Shopping Complex (Site D). The decision
on the location will be taken by four decision makers who have each
used the Simple Multi-attribute Rating Technique (SMART) to help
them to clarify their understanding of the decision problem (in the
models the monetary costs of the sites were treated as just another
attribute). Details of the values which each decision maker allocated
to the sites are given below.
Decision maker Site
A B C D
Brown 65 43 21 10
Jones 45 50 60 40
Smith 12 70 32 54
Thomson 23 45 50 70
Discuss the problems which are likely to be involved in obtaining
a decision for the group and evaluate possible ways of tackling
these problems.
(2) Because of recent increases in student numbers, East University has
to decide whether to relocate from its existing campus at Byron
Avenue to a new campus at Beach Park, a green field site. The senior
managers of the university have to agree on which course of action to
recommend to the Governing Body. The main criteria to be used in
the decision are the cost of developing the site, working conditions
for staff and students, the public image of the university, scope
for further expansion in the future, accessibility to public transport
facilities and reduction in road congestion.
To provide a formal structure to the decision and a defensible
rationale, the Simple Multi-attribute Rating Technique (SMART)
was used by each manager to determine his or her perception of
the relative importance of the criteria listed above and how well
the two options performed on these criteria. For each manager this
yielded a score for each course of action (for example, the University
President’s scores were ‘Stay at Byron Avenue’: 65.1, ‘Move to Beach
Park’: 34.9). For each option the scores for all the senior managers
were averaged and the results are shown below: