Revealed Comparative Advantage Method for Solving Multicriteria Decision-making Problems

Abstract This study proposes and analyzes a new method for the post-Pareto analysis of multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) problems: the revealed comparative advantage (RCA) assessment method. An interesting feature of the suggested method is that it uses the solution to a special eigenvalue problem and can be considered an analog/modification in the MCDM context of well-known ranking methods including the authority-hub method, PageRank method, and so on, which have been successfully applied to such fields as economics, bibliometrics, web search design, and so on. For illustrative purposes, this study discusses a particular MCDM problem to demonstrate the practicality of the method. The theoretical considerations and conducted calculations reveal that the RCA assessment method is self-consistent and easily implementable. Moreover, comparisons with well-known tools of an MCDM analysis shows that the results obtained using this method are appropriate and competitive. An important particularity of the RCA assessment method is that it can be useful for decision-makers in the case in which no decision-making authority is available or when the relative importance of various criteria has not been preliminarily evaluated.