Are multi-criteria decision making techniques useful for solving corporate finance problems? : a bibliometric analysis

Corporate financial decision making processes (selection of investments and funding sources) are becoming increasingly complex because of the growing number of con icting criteria that need to be considered. The main aim of this paper is to perform a bibliometric analysis of the international research on the application of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques to corporate finance issues during the period 1980-2012. A total of 347 publications from the Scopus database have been compiled, classified and analysed. The results obtained confirm: a) an increase in the importance of MCDM in corporate finance; b) the relevance of MCDM techniques in capital budgeting processes (fixed assets investment) and in the assessment of firms' economic and financial performance; c) the techniques based on the multiple attribute utility theory (MAUT) are the most popular in complex decision making situations as they are very simple to implement.