It is not unusual in real-life that one has to choose among finitely many alternatives when the merit of each alternative is not perfectly known. This may be the case when an individual chooses school, doctor or pension plan, or when a firm chooses between alternative R&D projects. Instead of...

The Pareto dominance relation is shown to be the unique nontrivial partial order on the set of finite-dimensional real vectors satisfying a number of intuitive properties. -- Pareto dominance ; characterization