New decision-making techniques and their application in the selection of financial products

We develop a new approach that uses the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator in the selection of financial products. In doing so, we introduce the ordered weighted averaging distance (OWAD) operator and the ordered weighted averaging adequacy coefficient (OWAAC) operator. These aggregation operators are very useful for decision-making problems because they establish a comparison between an ideal alternative and available options in order to find the optimal choice. The objective of this new model is to manipulate the attitudinal character of previous methods based on distance measures, so that the decision maker can select financial products according to his or her degree of optimism, which is also known as the orness measure. The main advantage of using the OWA operator is that we generate a parameterized family of aggregation operators between the maximum and the minimum. Thus, the analysis developed in the decision process by the decision maker is much more complete, because he or she is able to select the particular case in accordance with his or her interests in the aggregation process. The paper ends with an illustrative example that shows results obtained by using different types of aggregation operators in the selection of financial products. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.