%0 Journal Article
%T Evaluating Ethical Responsibility in Inverse Decision Support
%A Ahmad M. Kabil
%J Advances in Decision Sciences
%D 2012
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2012/873710
%X Decision makers have considerable autonomy on how they make decisions and what type of support they receive. This situation places the DSS analyst in a different relationship with the client than his colleagues who support regular MIS applications. This paper addresses an ethical dilemma in ¡°Inverse Decision Support,¡± when the analyst supports a decision maker who requires justification for a preconceived selection that does not correspond to the best option that resulted from the professional resolution of the problem. An extended application of the AHP model is proposed for evaluating the ethical responsibility in selecting a suboptimal alternative. The extended application is consistent with the Inverse Decision Theory that is used extensively in medical decision making. A survey of decision analysts is used to assess their perspective of using the proposed extended application. The results show that 80% of the respondents felt that the proposed extended application is useful in business practices. 14% of them expanded the usability of the extended application to academic teaching of the ethics theory. The extended application is considered more usable in a country with a higher Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (TICPI) than in a country with a lower one. 1. Introduction The ethical dilemma addressed in this paper is represented by a simple case. After his graduation, the first job of a decision analyst was the head of a decision support unit in a governmental agency of a developing country. The most important task he started with was to support the top decision maker of the agency in selecting the best one among several IT companies participating in a tender of a large-scale project. Using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) of Saaty [1] and considering specialists¡¯ judgment on the relative importance of detailed selection criteria, the analyst prepared a report recommending a specific company X that had the best offer. Upon receiving the report and listening to the professional presentation given by the analyst, the decision maker commented: ¡°it is a good work; however, you have to rewrite the report to show that company Y is the most suitable for this project.¡± The problem was defined by the analyst at this moment as ¡°developing criteria for a preselected decision¡± or ¡°Inverse Decision Support.¡± There were two notions conflicting in the back of analyst¡¯s mind. The first was the notion of ¡°support, not replace decision maker¡± as recommended by all known DSS textbooks [2¨C4]. In this notion, the decision maker is the owner of
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