The Voting Analytic Hierarchy Process revisited: A revised method with application to sustainable supplier selection

Grigory Pishchulov, Alexander Trautrims, Thomas Chesney, Stefan Gold and Leila Schwab

International Journal of Production Economics, 2019, vol. 211, issue C, 166-179

Abstract: Civil society increasingly holds focal companies accountable for ensuring socially and environmentally sustainable production standards among their supply base. These standards entail increased levels of complexity to be addressed by appropriately designed tools, such as the Voting Analytic Hierarchy Process (VAHP) proposed by Liu and Hai (2005). This method of multi-criteria group decision making structures decision criteria in a hierarchical fashion as per Saaty's Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and employs data envelopment analysis (DEA) for deriving criteria weights from the ordinal preferences of the group members. Compared to AHP, the method permits a simpler application in a group decision context. However, its theoretical underpinnings have been questioned in the literature. This specifically concerns (i) the requirement of a strong convex order for the importance weights of ordinal rank gradations, and (ii) the choice of discrimination threshold for consecutive rank weights in the underlying DEA model. We propose a revised VAHP method that overcomes both issues (i) and (ii) by pursuing a game-theoretic approach to elicitation of criteria weights — so as to remove subjectivity from rank discrimination. We illustrate the application of the method on a real-world problem of sustainable supplier selection. We contribute to theory by proposing a more robust VAHP tool that helps supply chain and purchasing managers selecting suppliers based on a comprehensive set of criteria spanning all three sustainability dimensions (economic, environmental, and social), while coping with parsimonious input by group decision-makers.

Keywords: Supplier selection; Sustainability; Multi-criteria decision making; Group decisions; Ordinal preferences; Preference aggregation; Game theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925527319300350
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:proeco:v:211:y:2019:i:c:p:166-179

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2019.01.025

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Production Economics is currently edited by Stefan Minner

More articles in International Journal of Production Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().