We analyse the use of the ordered weighted average (OWA) in de cision-making giving special attention to business and economic decision-making proble ms. We present several aggregation techniques that are very useful for decision-making such as the Hamming distance, the adequacy coefficient and the index of maximum and minimum level. We sug gest a new approach by using immediate weights, that is, by using the weighted average an d the OWA operator in the same formulation. We further generalize them by using generaliz ed and quasi-arithmetic means. We also analyse the applicability of the OWA operator in busine ss and economics and we see that we can use it instead of the weighted average. We end the paper wi th an application in a business multi-person decision-making problem regarding producti on management