sensitivity analysis Sensitivity analysis is the study of how the uncertainty in the output of a mathematical model or system (numerical or otherwise) can be divided and allocated to different sources of uncertainty in its inputs. A related practice is uncertainty ana ...

may reveal surprising insights in

multi-criteria decision making Multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) or multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a sub-discipline of operations research that explicitly evaluates multiple conflicting criteria in decision making (both in daily life and in settings s ...

(MCDM) studies aimed to select the best alternative among a number of competing alternatives. This is an important task in

decision making In psychology, decision-making (also spelled decision making and decisionmaking) is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be either ra ...

. In such a setting each alternative is described in terms of a set of evaluative criteria. These criteria are associated with weights of importance. Intuitively, one may think that the larger the weight for a criterion is, the more critical that criterion should be. However, this may not be the case. It is important to distinguish here the notion of ''criticality'' with that of ''importance.'' By ''critical,'' we mean that a criterion with small change (as a percentage) in its weight, may cause a significant change of the final solution. It is possible criteria with rather small weights of importance (i.e., ones that are not so important in that respect) to be much more critical in a given situation than ones with larger weights. That is, a sensitivity analysis may shed light into issues not anticipated at the beginning of a study. This, in turn, may dramatically improve the effectiveness of the initial study and assist in the successful implementation of the final solution.

References

{{reflist, 30em Mathematical modeling Mathematical and quantitative methods (economics)