Ranking Potential Investors Using the FITradeoff Method and Value Focused Thinking in a Group Decision Problem

This work aims to address a problem of attracting companies for direct investments in the state of Pernambuco, Brazil, with the purpose to aid the Economic Development Agency of Pernambuco (ADEPE) to rank the potential investors. Considering different points of view of multiple stakeholders of ADEPE, the Value-Focused Thinking (VFT) and FITradeoff (Flexible and Interactive Tradeoff) techniques are applied in the construction of the multicriteria decision model. The problem structuring provides a better understanding of an investor's decision-making process and leads to a better pitch to persuade them to invest in Pernambuco. Furthermore, the structured problem can be analyzed by a quantitative method aiming to rank the best alternatives that could match with the proposal of the Pernambuco state as a win-win investment movement. For that, the multicriteria decision model is built based on the VFT approach and the FITradeoff method. A set of 25 alternatives were defined and evaluated with respect to six criteria. Throughout the process, the preference modeling is performed in an interactive and flexible way where the decision makers (DMs) can switch between elicitation by decomposition to holistic evaluations.