Multicriteria decision systems for financial problems

Financial decision making is involved with a plethora of important issues for individual and institutional investors, managers of firms and organizations, as well as policy makers. The finance theory has adopted the wealth maximization principle, focusing on normative and descriptive approaches often highlighting multiple factors that drive this single goal. Multicriteria decision systems add important practical contributions in this context, supporting financial decision makers in modeling, analyzing, and evaluating multiple ways of action, under all decision criteria pertinent in a specific decision instance. This paper analyzes the relevance of multicriteria decision systems for financial decisions. A detailed discussion and up-to-date review on two important areas of financial decision support, namely portfolio selection and corporate performance evaluation, are also given to highlight how different multicriteria modeling approaches complement and enhance exiting techniques from the areas of finance and operations research.