Determining the utility functions of criteria used in the evaluation of real estate

This article presents an application of the UTA method and its variant UTA-CR to determining utility functions for the multicriteria evaluation of residential real estate. Data for the city of Volta Redonda, Brazil, were used in this study. Unlike UTA, UTA-CR makes use of the decision agents' preferences in relation to a set of criteria to determine a ranking of the alternatives. It was concluded that UTA-CR manages to obtain utility functions closer to the preferences of the decision agents as compared to these that result from the use of UTA. This demonstrates an important advantage of UTA-CR over UTA.