Cost-benefit & Multicriteria Assessment

We believe both MCA (Multicriteria) and CBA (Cost-benefit) are complementary tools, useful if provide meaningful information to support decision-making processes and multiparty negotiation processes.

MCA is just a table displaying alternative decisions against all decision criteria. The values assigned to each alternative for each criteria can be aggregated applying different (in its simple form, just weighted by the relative importance of each criteria –weights can be social preferences declared in surveys or revealed by market choices). In MCA is possible to include impacts not easily monetarised, or even not easily quantifiable.

CBA aggregates criteria in “costs” and “benefits” applying instead of weights market prices representing revealed preferences, or indirect measures somehow representing them as “shadow prices”.

MCRIT has applied MCA and CBA in a very large number of studies. Recently, MCRIT developed new methods to include health and conviviality benefits into CBA (Transport Authority of Barcelona, 2018) and has appraised from large roads and railways (e.g. INECO, for Spanish Ministry of Public Works, or the Government of Guatemala) to the renewal of the Tiete basin in Sao Paulo (Inter-American Development Bank 2017).