Group Prioritization in the AHP by Reducing the CRPS Influence

The problem of comparison reference-point shifting (CRPS), which probably occurs in decision makers/experts' (DMEs') judgment matrices (JMs) of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), is pointed out for the first time, and the CRPS influence on the estimation of decision-making priorities is analyzed. To solve the CRPS problem probably existing in the group AHP, an optimization model/approach of group priority estimation and its equivalent models of two-stage linear programming, aiming at reducing the CRPS influence as much as possible and at minimizing DMEs' subjective judgement deviations as well, are presented for the AHP group decision-making, by adopting the technical strategy of adjusting individual JMs based on the JM whose CRPS degree is the lowest. Applied to a simulation example, the presented approach is shown to perform better in the group priority estimation than the commonly-used prioritization methods for the group AHP.