Group decision makers making process - an analytic hierarchy approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method for group decision making that assesses individual influence on group consistency and proposes an iterative algorithm to improve decision coherence.

Contribution

It presents a novel algorithm for group decision making using AHP, focusing on individual influence and iterative consistency improvement.

Findings

The algorithm identifies influential decision makers based on consistency indices.

Iterative process can improve overall group consistency.

Decision process stops based on threshold or iteration count.

Abstract

The paper deals with a step-wise analytic hierarchy process (AHP) applied by a group of decision makers wherein nobody has a dominant position and it is unlikely to come to terms with respect to either the weights of different objectives or expected utilities of different alternatives. One of the AHP outcomes, that is the consistency index is computed for each decision maker, for all other decision makers but that one, and for the whole group. Doing so, the group is able to assess to which extent each decision maker alters the group consistency index and a better consistency index could be achieved if the assessment procedure is being resumed by the most influential decision maker in terms of consistency. The main contribution of the new approach is the algorithm presented in as a flow chart where the condition to stop the process might be either a threshold value for the consistency index, or a given number of iterations for the group or decision maker, depending on the degree to which the targeted goal has been decomposed into conflictual objectives.