Ranking-based MCDM models in financial management applications: analysis and emerging challenges

Over the last decades, the academic and professional communities have paid much attention toward the use of multi-criteria decision-making methods in a range of business and financial problems due to the variety and complexity of their decisions. Within this branch of operations research, the value-based and outranking relations approaches stand as two of the most powerful methodologies for decision-makers and analysts to produce accurate predictions and consistent evaluations in financial decision-making problems. This paper aims to provide an in-depth presentation of the contributions of multi-attribute value-based and outranking relations methods to a group of relevant financial applications in the period 2000–2018, putting the emphasis on the state-of-the-art developments and identifying open questions and critical challenges that deserve further research efforts.