Eliciting personalized AHP scale from verbal pairwise comparisons

Bapi Dutta, Álvaro Labella, Alessio Ishizaka and Luis Martínez

Journal of the Operational Research Society, 2025, vol. 76, issue 3, 541-553

Abstract: The particularity of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) lies in its method of comparing criteria and alternatives pairwise using a linguistic scale to obtain their priorities. The main challenge involves translating these linguistic terms into a numeric values to facilitate computations of priorities. For this purpose, there are several possible numerical scales to translate lingusitic terms, and identifying the one that fits best for an individual is key to derive precise priorities. Therefore, our goal here is to identify the most suitable personalized numerical AHP scale for individuals from their mental representation of the verbal scale, obtained via a psychological experiment, by means of a new approach comprising two steps: (i) learning parameter of numeric scales, which represents the individual’s perceived view towards different scales, from individuals’ mental representation; (ii) finding the most representative numerical scale as per their distance from the mental representation. The scale mapping process has been demonstrated through a numerical experiment, and it has been found that arbitrary choice of the scale parameter could lead to the wrong personalization of an individual’s numeric scale.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/01605682.2024.2376033

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