Decision makers have considerable autonomy on how they make decisions and what type of support they receive. This situation places the DSS analyst in a different relationship with the client than his colleagues who support regular MIS applications. This paper addresses an ethical dilemma in “Inverse Decision Support,” when the analyst supports a decision maker who requires justification for a preconceived selection that does not correspond to the best option that resulted from the professional resolution of the problem. An extended application of the AHP model is proposed for evaluating the ethical responsibility in selecting a suboptimal alternative. The extended application is consistent with the Inverse Decision Theory that is used extensively in medical decision making. A survey of decision analysts is used to assess their perspective of using the proposed extended application. The results show that 80% of the respondents felt that the proposed extended application is useful in business practices. 14% of them expanded the usability of the extended application to academic teaching of the ethics theory. The extended application is considered more usable in a country with a higher Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (TICPI) than in a country with a lower one. 1. Introduction The ethical dilemma addressed in this paper is represented by a simple case. After his graduation, the first job of a decision analyst was the head of a decision support unit in a governmental agency of a developing country. The most important task he started with was to support the top decision maker of the agency in selecting the best one among several IT companies participating in a tender of a large-scale project. Using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) of Saaty [1] and considering specialists’ judgment on the relative importance of detailed selection criteria, the analyst prepared a report recommending a specific company X that had the best offer. Upon receiving the report and listening to the professional presentation given by the analyst, the decision maker commented: “it is a good work; however, you have to rewrite the report to show that company Y is the most suitable for this project.” The problem was defined by the analyst at this moment as “developing criteria for a preselected decision” or “Inverse Decision Support.” There were two notions conflicting in the back of analyst’s mind. The first was the notion of “support, not replace decision maker” as recommended by all known DSS textbooks [2–4]. In this notion, the decision maker is the owner of
References
[1]
T. Saaty, The Analytic Hierarchy Process, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, USA, 1980.
[2]
E. Turban, J. Aronson, T. Liang, and R. Sharda, Decision Support and Business Intelligence Systems, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA, 8th edition, 2006.
[3]
G. Marakas, Decision Support Systems, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA, 2002.
[4]
P. Keen and M. Morton, Decision Support Systems: An Organizational Perspective, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass, USA, 1978.
[5]
H. Forester-Miller and T. Davis, A Practitioner's Guide To Ethical DeciSion Making, American Counseling Association, 1996, http://www.counseling.org/Resources/CodeOfEthics/TP/Home/CT2.aspx.
[6]
“Association for computing machinery ACM code of ethics and professional conduct,” 1992, http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics.
[7]
IEEE, “IEEE Code of Ethics,” 2006, http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/about/whatis/code.html.
[8]
R. Davison, “Professional ethics in information systems: a personal perspective,” Communications of the AIS, vol. 3, no. 8, pp. 1–34, 2000.
[9]
M. T. Jelassi, K. Williams, and C. S. Fidler, “The emerging role of DSS: from passive to active,” Decision Support Systems, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 299–307, 1987.
[10]
S. S. Sabne, Inverse Decision Making and Goal Attainment: A Proof of Concept as a New Approach to the Decision Making Process under Uncertainty, Old Dominion University Press, Norfolk, UK, 2006.
[11]
R. Swartz, D. Dennis, C. Scott, D. Kalatu, and F. Michele Follen, “Inverse decision theory,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, vol. 101, no. 473, pp. 1–8, 2006.
[12]
J. P. Shim, M. Warkentin, J. F. Courtney, D. J. Power, R. Sharda, and C. Carlsson, “Past, present, and future of decision support technology,” Decision Support Systems, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 111–126, 2002.
[13]
C. Ferraz and F. Finan, “Exposing corrupt politicians: the effects of Brazil’s publicly released audits on electoral outcomes,” Discussion Paper No. 2836, The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn, Germany, 2007.
[14]
B. A. Olken, “Monitoring corruption: evidence from a field experiment in Indonesia,” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 115, no. 2, pp. 200–249, 2007.
[15]
R. Reinikka and J. Svensson, “Local capture: evidence from a central government transfer program in Uganda,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 119, no. 2, pp. 679–705, 2004.
[16]
R. Di Teila and E. Schargrodsky, “The role of wages and auditing during a crackdown on corruption in the city of Buenos Aires,” Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 269–292, 2003.
[17]
D. Arnott, P. O'donnell, and M. Grice, “Judgment bias and decision support systems research,” in Proceedings of the 4th Australasian Conference on Information Systems, pp. 65–80, Brisbane, Australia, 1993.
[18]
R. Meredith and D. Arnott, “On ethics and decision support systems development,” in Proceeding of the 7th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems, pp. 1562–1575, Adelaide, Australia, 2003.
[19]
O. Ferrell and L. Gresham, “A Contingency framework for understanding ethical decision-making in marketing,” Journal of Marketing, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 87–96, 1985.
[20]
D. P. Robin, R. E. Reidenbach, and P. J. Forrest, “The perceived importance of an ethical issue as an influence on the ethical decision-making of ad managers,” Journal of Business Research, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 17–28, 1996.
[21]
A. Wong and E. Beckman, “An applied ethical analysis system in business,” Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 173–178, 1992.
[22]
T. Jones, “Ethical decision making by individuals in organizations: an issue-contingent model,” Academy of Management Review, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 366–395, 1991.
[23]
S. Hunt and S. Vitell, “A general theory of marketing ethics,” Journal of Macromarketing, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 5–16, 1986.
[24]
L. Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development, Volume I: The Philosophy of Moral Development, Harper and Row, San Francisco, Calif, USA, 1981.
[25]
S. Musser and E. Orke, “A basic typology of ethical value systems,” in Proceedings of the Council of Employees Rights and Responsibilities Conference, Miami, Fla, USA, 1992.
[26]
J. Carlson, D. Carlson, and L. Wadsworth, “On the relationship between DSS design characteristics and ethical decision making,” Journal of Managerial Issues, vol. 11, pp. 180–197, 1999.
[27]
D. Johnson and J. Mulvey, “Accountability and computer decision systems (ethics and computer use),” Communications of the ACM, vol. 38, no. 12, pp. 58–64, 1995.
[28]
B. Chae, D. Paradice, J. F. Courtney, and C. J. Cagle, “Incorporating an ethical perspective into problem formulation: implications for decision support systems design,” Decision Support Systems, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 197–212, 2005.
[29]
J. Fox, “Decision-support systems as safety-critical components: towards a safety culture for medical informatics.,” Methods of Information in Medicine, vol. 32, no. 5, pp. 345–348, 1993.
[30]
R. Miller and K. Goodman, Ethical Challenges in the Use of Decision-Support Software in Clinical Practice, Edited by K. W. Goodman, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Mass, USA, 1998.
[31]
T. L. Beauchamp, “Methods and principles in biomedical ethics,” Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 29, no. 5, pp. 269–274, 2003.
[32]
C. Oliver and M. Twery, Decision Support Systems/Models and Analyses, Edited by W. Sexton, A. Malik, R. Szaro and N. Johnson, Elsevier, Oxford, UK, 1999.
[33]
M. Danielson, “Handling imperfect user statements in real-life decision analysis,” International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 513–534, 2004.
[34]
R. L. Keeney, “Common mistakes in making value trade-offs,” Operations Research, vol. 50, no. 6, pp. 935–945, 2002.
[35]
F. Barron, “Influence of missing attributes on selecting a best multi-attributed alternative,” Decision Sciences, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 194–205, 1984.
[36]
J. Blythe, “Visual exploration and incremental utility elicitation,” in Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI '02), pp. 526–532, Alberta, Canada, August 2002.
[37]
T. Saaty and L. G. Vargas, Models, Methods, Concepts and Applications of the Analytic Hierarchy Process, Kluwer, Boston, Mass, USA, 2001.
[38]
T. L. Saaty and M. Sagir, “Extending the measurement of tangibles to intangibles,” International Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 7–27, 2009.
[39]
H. L. Li and L. C. Ma, “Ranking decision alternatives by integrated DEA, AHP and gower plot techniques,” International Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 241–258, 2008.
[40]
N. Ahmad, D. Berg, and G. R. Simons, “The integration of analytical hierarchy process and data envelopment analysis in a multi-criteria decision-making problem,” International Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 263–276, 2006.
[41]
A. Nieto-Morote and F. Ruz-Vila, “A fuzzy ahp multi-criteria decision-making approach applied to combined cooling, heating, and power production systems,” International Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 497–517, 2011.
[42]
N. S. Thomaidis, N. Nikitakos, and G. D. Dounias, “The evaluation of information technology projects: a fuzzy multicriteria decision-making approach,” International Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 89–122, 2006.
[43]
A. Kabil and M. Kabeil, Initial Requirements of National Crisis Decision Support System, Edited by M. Jennex, IGI Global, Hershey, Pa, Usa, 2011.
[44]
O. Onesime, X. Xu, and D. Zhan, “A decision support system for supplier selection process,” International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 453–470, 2004.
[45]
L. T. Wu, X. Cui, and R. W. Dai, “Judgment number reduction: an issue in the analytic hierarchy process,” International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 175–189, 2010.
[46]
R. W. Robbins and W. A. Wallace, “Decision support for ethical problem solving: a multi-agent approach,” Decision Support Systems, vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 1571–1587, 2007.
[47]
W. Maner, “Heuristic methods for computer ethics,” Metaphilosophy, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 339–365, 2002.
[48]
Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index, “Transparency international organization,” 2010, http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2010/press#report.
