Prioritized OWA aggregation

We indicate that the problem of prioritized criteria arises in situations in which there exists a relationship between the criteria so that lack of satisfaction by the higher priority criteria cannot be readily compensated for by satisfaction by lower priority criteria. Typical of this situation is the relationship between safety and cost. We consider the problem of criteria aggregation in this environment. Central to our approach is the use of importance weights to enforce this prioritization imperative. We apply our use of priority based importance weights to the case where the scope of the criteria aggregation is an OWA type aggregation.