AHP's Promises and Limitations as Decision Tool for Procedural Justice; Evaluating AHP for Accuracy, Efficiency and Fair Participation

摘要

The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is increasingly used within the QFD tradition to support complex decisions in design projects with multiple stakeholders. AHP is welcomed for justifying decisions and Todd and Zagrofoss (2005) mention its promise for supporting procedural justice, which regards transparency and fairness of decisions. This is useful for policy settings when mediating diverse stakeholder interests as well as for any prioritization question with diverse criteria (like esthetics versus safety versus throughput) or with allocation of scarce resources. However, AHP's promises for procedural justice are partly grounded in its supposed numerical accuracy (Mazur and Hopwood II, 2007; Steiguer, Duberstein and Lopes, 2003). We show that the numerical basis of AHP is not as unambiguous as current 'AHP standard practice' suggests and that the ambiguities impact the weights in the AHP normalized eigenvectors significantly. Still, AHP performs relatively well on other criteria for procedural justice (efficiency and fair participation), which may explain its continuing and growing popularity. We conclude that the research and practitioner community should on the one hand continue to develop AHP's procedures for full participation of all types of stakeholders, while on the other hand not ignoring the accuracy problems. The long term legitimacy of AHP rests on improving accuracy of multi-criteria weighting procedures, while remaining efficient and transparent for 'lay' participants.