WEAK CONSISTENCY AND QUASI-LINEAR MEANS IMPLY THE ACTUAL RANKING

Abstract

It is known that in the Analytic Hierarchy Process (A.H.P.) a scale of relative importance for alternatives is derived from a pairwise comparisons matrix A = (aij). Priority vectors are basically provided by the following methods: the right eigenvector method, the geometric mean method and the arithmetic mean method. Antipriority vectors can also be considered; they are built by both the left eigenvector method and mean procedures applied to the columns of A. When the matrix A is inconsistent, priority and antipriority vectors do not indicate necessarily the same ranking. We deal with the problem of the reliability of quantitative rankings and we use quasi-linear means for providing a more general approach to get priority and antipriority vectors.