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Operationality:

attributes should be meaningful to the decision-maker;

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Completeness:

all important aspects of a problem should be encompassed by dimensions;

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Decomposibility:

given the complexity in decision situations, attributes should be reduced to simpler (but not oversimplified) parts for intelligible handling;

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Non-redundancy:

attributes should not contain redundancies such as measuring the same things by different means;

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minimization:

the number of dimensions should be kept as small as credibly possible.