Choosing and evaluating technology policy: A multicriteria approach

The multicriteria nature of choosing and evaluating technology policy can be dealt with by outranking methods, enabling us to avoid weak approaches such as following rules or routines or imitating best practices on one hand, and fictitious multicriteria methods on the other. Outranking methods can strongly support policy makers and social scientists in choosing and evaluating technology policy. They are consistent with behavioral-evolutionary theory, and they allow us to maintain the variety and realism of problem solving in technology policy. Being based on formal and robust algorithms, they also represent a sound theoretical alternative to neo-classical approaches, both in their orthodox and hidden versions. The adoption of outranking methods has a number of theoretical and policy implications. A tutorial (and numerical) example shows how easily they can be applied. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.