"Reduction of Pairwise Comparisons in Decision Making via
a Duality Approach,"
Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis,
Vol. 8, Nu. 6, pp. 299-310, 1999 (However, this issue was published on July 2000).
Evangelos Triantaphyllou
Abstract:
Although pairwise comparisons have been seen by many as an
effective and intuitive way for eliciting qualitative data for
multi-criteria decision making problems, a major drawback is that
the number of the required comparisons increases quadratically
with the number of the entities to be compared. Thus, often even
data for medium size decision problems may be impractical to be
elicited via pairwise comparisons. The more the comparisons are,
the higher is the likelihood that the decision maker will
introduce erroneous data. This paper introduces a dual
formulation to a given multi-criteria decision making problem,
which can significantly alleviate the previous problems. Some
theoretical results establish that this is possible when the
number of alternatives is greater than the number of decision
criteria plus one.
Key Words:
Pairwise comparisons, multi-criteria decision making, the
Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), duality.
