  In many real-world multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) problems, mining
the inter-relationships and possible hierarchical structures among the factors
are considered to be one of the primary tasks. But, besides that, one major
task is to determine an optimal strategy to work on the factors to enhance the
effect on the goal attribute. This paper proposes two such strategies, namely
parallel and hierarchical effort assignment, and propagation strategies. The
concept of effort propagation through a strategy is formally defined and
described in the paper. Both the parallel and hierarchical strategies are
divided into sub-strategies based on whether the assignment of efforts to the
factors is uniform or depends upon some appropriate heuristics related to the
factors in the system. The adapted and discussed heuristics are the relative
significance and effort propagability of the factors. The strategies are
analyzed for a real-life case study regarding Indian high school administrative
factors that play an important role in enhancing students' performance. Total
effort propagation of around 7%-15% to the goal is seen across the proposed
strategies given a total of 1 unit of effort to the directly accessible factors
of the system. A comparative analysis is adapted to determine the optimal
strategy among the proposed ones to enhance student performance most
effectively. The highest effort propagation achieved in the work is
approximately 14.4348%. The analysis in the paper establishes the necessity of
research towards the direction of effort propagation analysis in case of
decision-making problems.
