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The paper aims to study relationships between results obtained by two instruments, the rational-experiential inventory, in its modified version named REI-20, and the general decision-making style (GDMS). Although both instruments differ in concept and construction of decision styles, they refer to two very similar constructs—rationality and experientiality or intuition, resulting from the dual concept of cognitive-experiential self-theory. Using the same experimental sample, we examined the relationships between the REI-20 modes, i.e., rational and experiential, and GDMS modes, i.e., rational, intuitive, dependent, avoidant, and spontaneous. We checked how rational and experiential decision-making styles identified by REI-20 correspond to the rational and intuitive modes of GDMS. We also examined the relationships between clusters of decision-making profiles, defined as combinations of various levels of rational and intuitive/experiential modes determined from both instruments. Finally, we analyzed the gender differences between the styles identified by both inventories. The between-tool analysis showed that rationality determined from REI-20 and GDMS correlate only weakly; however, the correlation between experientiality and intuitiveness is strong. Both tools produced inconclusive results when comparing gender differences. REI-20 differentiated significantly between genders, indicating that women are less rational and more experimental than men, while GDMS considered these differences insignificant. It implies that using a particular decision-making style inventory in advanced analyses of the process and outcomes of the decision-making requires exceptional caution as various tools may produce a different classification of decision-makers and lead to different, if not contradictory, conclusions.

The Negotiation Support Systems often implement multiple criteria decision aiding (MCDA) techniques for building a negotiation scoring system. Those formal models should meet the needs, motivations, expectations, and cognitive abilities of users. In this paper, we try to explore the effects of decision maker’s subjective perception of ease of use, time requirements, interface, preference representation, and efficiency of a particular MCDA method on the choice regarding the future use of this method. The multinomial logistic regression model is built and analysed. The analysis is based on data from online decision making experiments, where three MCDA methods were implemented, i.e. AHP, SMART, and TOPSIS. The study provides several interesting findings, concerning the behavioural aspects of multiple criteria decision aiding in software support systems. Most of the users recommended TOPSIS as the best one for supporting decisions in the future. This is a fast technique, for which we used an attractive graphical interface, suggesting that these factors play a crucial role in the users’ choices. However, the causative regression model showed that the user’s positive experience in using a particular method, i.e. its effectiveness in solving an exemplary numerical case, has the highest impact on the method’s choice for future use. The second most important factor is the adequacy in representing the user’s preferences by this method. We show, however, that the strengths of effects and their significance may vary across the methods. Understanding the decision maker’s evaluations of the MCDA techniques may help build a cognitive negotiation support system that satisfies the user’s expectations.

In this paper we propose a multi-criteria model based on the fuzzy preferences approach which can be implemented in the prenegotiation phase to evaluate the negotiations packages. The applicability of some multi-criteria ranking methods were discussed for building a scoring function for negotiation packages. The first one is Simple Additive Weighting(SAW) technique which determines the sum of the partial satisfactions from each negotiation issue and aggregate them using the issue weights. The other one is Distance Based Methods (DBM), with its extension based on the distances to ideal or anti-ideal package, i.e. the TOPSIS procedure. In our approach the negotiator's preferences over the issues are represented by fuzzy membership functions and next a selected multi-criteria decision making method is adopted to determine the global rating of each package. The membership functions are used here as the equivalents of utility functions spread over the negotiation issues, which let us compare different type of data. One of the key advantages of the approach proposed is its usefulness for building a general scoring functionin the ill-structured negotiation problem, namely the situation in which the problem itself as well as the negotiators preferences cannot be precisely defined, the available information is uncertain, subjective and vague. Secondly, all proposed variants of scoring functionsproduce consistent rankings, even though the new packages are added (or removed) and do not result in rank reversal.

In this paper, we present the mechanism of scoring alternatives based on the even-swap method. The mechanism we propose derives from the notion of additive scoring systems that are commonly used in multiple criteria decision-making. In contrast to the classic approach, we use the notion of aggregated equivalent amounts defined in the even-swap procedure. This allows to determine the global scores of alternatives that can be easily interpreted and compared by a decision-maker, since they are natural and intuitive, e.g., price. We modify the original even-swap algorithm, which enables us to construct a scoring system and to find the ranking of all alternatives by means of single non-artificial criterion. In this paper, we apply the algorithm of the modified approach to the problem of selecting the heating source for an individual house building project.