Strict Superiority

Strict superiority (also called dominance) describes the rare, easy case in a multi-factor decision: one of the options is no worse than its rivals on every relevant factor and better on at least one. When that holds, you can pick it immediately. No scoring, no weighting, and no conversion between dimensions is needed, because there is nothing to trade away — choosing the dominant option costs you nothing on any factor that matters.

CF’s interest in the concept is largely diagnostic. Elliot Temple uses it to mark the boundary between decisions that are trivial and those that are genuinely hard. If an option is strictly superior, the answer is obvious and uncontroversial. The hard cases — which is to say almost all real decisions — are precisely the ones where no option dominates, so the alternatives differ by tradeoffs: option A wins on price, option B wins on quality. Here strict superiority gives no guidance.

This framing supports CF’s broader critique of weighted factor analysis and pro/con lists. Those methods claim to resolve tradeoffs by summing weighted scores, but combining factors in different dimensions requires made-up conversion factors that smuggle in a pre-existing conclusion. Strict superiority is the one situation where adding things up is unnecessary anyway. So CF’s positive method instead converts factors into binary good-enough tests (see binary evaluation) and looks for a decisive criticism, rather than pretending a weighted total has legitimately settled a tradeoff.