Sample Allocation for Multiple Attribute Selection Problems

Published

December 10, 2014

Author(s)

Dennis D. Leber, Jeffery W. Herrmann

Abstract

Prior to making a multiple attribute selection decision, a decision-maker may collect information to estimate the value of each attribute for each alternative. In this work, we consider a fixed experimental sample budget and address the problem of how best to allocate this budget across three attributes when the attribute value estimates have a normally distributed measurement error. We illustrate that the allocation choice impacts the decision-maker’s ability to select the true best alternative. Through a simulation study we evaluate the performance of a common allocation approach of uniformly distributing the sample budget across the three attributes. We compare these results to the performance of several allocation rules that leverage the decision-maker’s preferences. We found that incorporating the decision-maker’s preferences, as well as knowledge about the characteristics of the alternatives, into the allocation choice improves the probability of selecting the true best alternative.

Conference Dates

December 7-10, 2014

Conference Location

Savannah, GA

Conference Title

Proceedings of the 2014 Winter Simulation Conference

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

Ranking and selection, experimental design, simulation, multicriteria decision making, decision analysis

Citation

Leber, D. and Herrmann, J. (2014), Sample Allocation for Multiple Attribute Selection Problems, Proceedings of the 2014 Winter Simulation Conference, Savannah, GA, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=916091 (Accessed October 9, 2025)