Arguing over Actions That Involve Multiple Criteria: A Critical Review

There has recently been many proposals to adopt an argumentative approach to decision-making. As the underlying assumptions made in these different approaches are not always clearly stated, we review these works, taking a more classical decision theory perspective, more precisely a multicriteria perspective. It appears that these approaches seem to have much to offer to decision models, because they allow a great expressivity in the specification of agents’ preferences, because they naturally cater for partial specification of preferences, and because they make explicit many aspects that are usually somewhat hidden in decision models. On the other hand, the typically intrinsic evaluation used in these approaches is not always the most appropriate, and it is not always clear how the multicriteria feature is taken into account when it comes to aggregating several arguments that may potentially interact.