A satisficing game theory approach for group evaluation of production units

The problem under consideration in this paper is that of analysing the performance of a production unit in two directions: resource utilization versus output perfomance on the one hand and inter-unit comparison (within-group evaluation) on the other hand, all this subjected to possible subjective intervention of a decision maker or group of decision makers (DMs). A well known method that deals mainly with the second point (without intervention of DMs) of this problem which is widely covered in the literature is the so called data envelopment analysis (DEA). The point of view that will be expressed in this paper can be thought of as complementary to the DEA approach giving a more complete analysis in terms of the weak points of units identification and DMs' recommendations. The performance of each decision unit is evaluated through the so called satisfiability functions in the framework of satisficing game theory. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.