A note on the statistical analysis of point judgment matrices

Abstract

The Analytic Hierarchy Process is a multicriteria decision making technique developed by Saaty in the 1970s. The core of the approach is the pairwise comparison of objects according to a single criterion using a 9-point ratio scale and the estimation of weights associated with these objects based on the resultant judgment matrix. In the present paper some statistical approaches to extracting the weights of objects from a judgment matrix are reviewed and new ideas which are rooted in the traditional method of paired comparisons are introduced.

Key words: Analytic Hierarchy Process, least squares, logistic distribution, Bradley-Terry model, Kullback-Leibler distance.