Benson recognized as one of his field’s top scholars in new book
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – American Economic Institutions Professor Dr. Harold Benson was featured in the new book, “Multiple Criteria Decision Making: From Early History to the 21st Century,” as one of the leading scholars in the field of Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM).
The book, authored by Murat Köksalan, Jyrki Wallenius and Stanley Zionts, dissects the beginnings of MCDM, its transformations during each decade and lists the elite researchers who have contributed greatly to the field.
Dr. Benson has had approximately 85 refereed articles and book chapters published, but only 36 have dealt with MCDM. Still, Dr. Benson’s insights and contributions to MCDM have been so significant, he was included in this esteemed class although less than half of his published work involved MCDM. The remainder of Dr. Benson’s work is in the field of global optimization and related areas of optimization and its applications.
According to the authors, among the advances Dr. Benson has contributed are “introducing, defining and studying an improved definition of proper efficiency in multiple objective nonlinear programming (MONLP); studying the existence of efficient solutions in MONLP; introducing and studying the domination property with respect to cones in MONLP; introducing, studying the theory of, and creating algorithms for the problem of optimizing over the efficient set; [and] introducing new ways to detect complete efficiency in MONLP and [multiple objective linear programming] MOLP.”
Dr. Benson was the 2004 recipient of the Georg Cantor Award, which is the highest honor the International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision Making can bestow upon a researcher. The award is given to those who have “personified the spirit of independent inquiry and whose many innovative ideas and achievements are decidedly reflected in the theory, methodology, and current practices of MCDM.”
Dr. Benson, who has served as Associate Editor for numerous academic journals including the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, the Journal of Global Optimization, Naval Research Logistics and the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, has been a professor at the Warrington College of Business Administration since 1979. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics with High Distinction from the University of Michigan in 1971. He earned a Master of Science degree in Industrial Engineering and the Management Sciences (1973), and he earned a Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering and the Management Sciences (1976) from Northwestern University.
