Multi-criteria investment analysis under uncertainty

Abstract

Summary form only given. A novel multi-criteria investment analysis under uncertainty is presented. The maximum entropy method has been used to establish the probability distribution. Entropy measures the amount of information that is available in a sequence of outcomes. A algorithm developed by U. Saxena has been used to find the means and variances. After calculating the means and variances, the expectation-variance measures, which involve reducing the economic desirability of a project into a single measure including consideration of the expected outcome as well as variation of that outcome, have been used in comparing each criterion of an investment with the same criterion of another investment. This comparison involves the weighting factors method. In the algorithm, it is supposed that the decision-maker is risk-averse and the criteria used in the algorithm are independent. The decision-maker must be consistent in deciding about the probability bounds and the relative weightings of the criteria. >