Multi-criteria decision making in health care

This special issue was initiated during a workshop meeting with colleagues of the University of Exeter and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2017. The discussions at this workshop showed that in most of the impactful research projects, it was impossible to reduce decisions to one key criterion to assess the quality of a solution. However, the research projects discussed typically included additional criteria on an implicit basis only. Thus, it appeared to be a promising undertaking to focus explicitly on multi-criteria approaches for health care applications. In fact, many operations research publications have stated that decision making in health care is a multi-criteria decision problem.