Outsourced Vendor Selection using Willingness-to-Pay for Multi-Criteria Performance Dimensions

This project applies a multi-criteria approach for outsourced vendor selection for services, that extends the total cost of ownership method. It assumes a group of 4-6 finalists have been chosen after a vetting process. The challenge is that price may be the same or almost the same for each vendor, and the main selection criteria include many performance dimensions such as clarity, responsiveness, courtesy, and others. We apply willingness-to-pay, where the performance of each potential vendor is converted to a monetary scale. This is done using discrete choice experiments to determine indifference probabilities that are facilitated by color-coded uncertainty visualizations. This work has been accepted for presentation at the national Decision Sciences Institute (DSI) conference in San Francisco, November 2026.

Researchers: Yiqiu Li and Huy Tuan Ngo