In psychology, decision-making is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several alternative possibilities. Every decision-making process produces a final choice that may or may not prompt action. Decision-making is the process of identifying and choosing alternatives based on the values and preferences of the decision-maker. Decision-making can be regarded as a problem-solving activity terminated by a solution deemed to be satisfactory. It is therefore a process which can be more or less rational orirrational and can be based on explicit knowledge or tacit knowledge. Human performance with regard to decisions has been the subject of active research from several perspectives: - Psychological: examining individual decisions in the context of a set of needs, preferences and values the individual has or seeks. - Cognitive: the decision-making process regarded as a continuous process integrated in the interaction with the environment. - Normative: the analysis of individual decisions concerned with the logic of decision-making, or communicative rationality, and the invariant choice it leads to. A major part of decision-making involves the analysis of a finite set of alternatives described in terms of evaluative criteria. Then the task might be to rank these alternatives in terms of how attractive they are to the decision-maker(s) when all the criteria are considered simultaneously. Another task might be to find the best alternative or to determine the relative total priority of each alternative (for instance, if alternatives represent projects competing for funds) when all the criteria are considered simultaneously. Solving such problems is the focus of multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). This area of decision-making, although very old, has attracted the interest of many researchers and practitioners and is still highly debated as there are many MCDA methods which may yield very different results when they are applied on exactly the same data. The editor has degrees in Engineering Physics & Nuclear Engineering from the University of Michigan and is an Engineer & Former Intelligence Officer for the CIA & US Intelligence Community and was President of an award-winning Defense Contracting Company. He has authored several books, edited numerous other books and has written many Technical, Classified & Unclassified papers, Articles & Essays. He has also been a Contributing Author for The International Encyclopedia on Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence and written several award-winning software manuals that have been sold in more than a dozen countries. He has appeared in Marquis "Who's Who in the World" & "Who's Who in Science & Engineering" and continues to edit and write.