Improving Decision Making in Organisations Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making Held at Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, UK, August 21st–26th, 1988

McrM has been an active research area for over 20 years and the previous conferences clearly showed a tremendous growth of interest. A variety of successful applications and recent developments of interactive computer software to support decision making confinn a sustained progress. We therefore decided to make our theme "Inlproving Decision Making in Organisations". '!he aim was to take stock of the impact of multicriteria concepts in organisations and to involve management practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds. To this end the conference was organised round five broad themes and papers were solicited on the following topics:- Psychology - how do individuals in practice use and relate to the methodologies. Organisation - how do our models fit into the decision making framework of real organisations. Application - how have the models been used in practice and what is the users view. Methodology - what are the new areas in model development. Related Areas - is there complementary work eg. Expert Systems which may be attempting to solve very similar problems. '!he call for papers produced an overwhelming response of over 100 papers. '!hey were from a variety of disciplines and applications, and we decided to devote approximately one day to each of the five areas. We are very impressed by the results which can be seen in this edited proceedings.