[arbie]

If that's the same as multivariate opt, there are billion-dollar industries that rely on it every day.

[xapata]

No, unless I've mistaken the phrase, they're not the same. I'm thinking of the problem when competing criteria can't be satisfactorily combined as inputs to a function with a scalar output. This comes up in ethical paradoxes, for example.

[rmateus]

Making value trade-offs between competing criteria ultimately boils down to hard ethical choices (not exactly paradoxes)