An Experiment on the Numerical Modelling of Verbal Ratio Statements

Mari Pöyhönen · Raimo P. Hämäläinen · Ahti A. Salo

109 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis

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Multi-Criteria Decision Making Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics Game Theory and Voting Systems

Abstract

Verbal statements are intuitively attractive for preference elicitation. In the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) the verbal responses to pairwise comparisons of relative importance are converted into real numbers according to the nine-point integer scale. Several alternative scales have been proposed for the conversion, but sufficient empirical evidence has not been produced to support the choice among these scales. We performed a comparative study in which subjects were requested to quantify verbal ratio statements by adjusting the heights of visually displayed bars. Subjects were also asked to employ verbal expressions in pairwise comparisons of areas of figures with different shapes. The principal result of the experiment was that the perceived meaning of the verbal expressions varies from one subject to the next and also depends on the set of elements involved in the comparison. Our results indicate that there are alternative numerical scales which yield more accurate estimates than the usual 1-to-9 scale and reduce the inconsistency of the comparison matrices. Alternative ways of using verbal preference statements are suggested to overcome the difficulties that arise from the context dependence of verbal pairwise comparisons. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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References

1985The Analytic Hierarchy Process 1986Decision analysis and behavioral research 1993Context-Dependent Preferences 1992A critical survey on the status of multiple criteria decision making theory and practice 1982How probable is probable? A numerical translation of verbal probability expressions 1993Behavioral influences on weight judgments in multiattribute decision making 1995Preference programming through approximate ratio comparisons 1990Some Comments on the Analytic Hierarchy Process

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