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Evaluating AHP as multi-stakeholder decision tool
Abstract
The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is increasingly used as decision support method in concurrent innovation projects with multiple stakeholders. AHP is welcomed for supporting procedural justice, which regards transparency and fairness of decisions. This is useful for policy settings, with diverse stakeholder interests, for prioritization questions with diverse criteria or for allocation of scarce resources. However, AHP's promises for procedural justice are partly grounded in its supposed numerical accuracy. We show that the numerical basis of AHP is not as unambiguous as current 'AHP standard practice' suggests. By contrast, AHP can contribute to the other criteria for procedural justice (efficiency and participation), which may explain AHP's 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 finding solutions to the accuracy problems.
... Essa relação está mais alinhada com as organizações orientadas por poder de barganha, ou seja, do tipo arms-length (Bridoux & Stoelhorst, 2014). Além disso, está ancorada em estudos que tratam da influência dos stakeholders percebidos como prioritários na tomada de decisão (Simons & Wiegel, 2009;Chakhar & Saad, 2014;Dye, Eggers & Shapira, 2014;MacDonald, Clarke & Huang, 2018). ...
A participação dos stakeholders no processo de decisão tem sido recomendada por trazer vantagens competitivas para as organizações. Nesse sentido, esta pesquisa tem por objetivo entender qual a relação entre a gestão para stakeholders e a participação no processo de decisão. Para tanto, foi desenvolvido um ensaio teórico com o objetivo de levantar proposições de pesquisa e reflexões teóricas sobre o tema. Com este trabalho busca-se instigar pesquisas sobre as seguintes proposições: Proposição 1: Quanto maior a prioridade do stakeholder maior a participação no processo de decisão organizacional; Proposição 2: Quanto maior a reciprocidade no relacionamento com o stakeholder maior a participação no processo de decisão organizacional; Proposição 3: O tipo de stakeholder modera a relação entre a prioridade do stakeholder e a participação no processo de decisão organizacional e Proposição 4: As características do stakeholder moderam a relação entre a reciprocidade no relacionamento com o stakeholder e a participação no processo de decisão organizacional. Embora o trabalho discuta o tema ainda de forma embrionária, pode-se verificar um potencial de investigação para as questões que o permeiam. Uma dessas questões refere-se aos limites para a participação dos stakeholders na tomada de decisão para que haja benefício mútuo em vez do aumento de conflitos de interesses ou de alianças políticas. Outro ponto é como operacionalizar empiricamente e operar gerencialmente um relacionamento de reciprocidade entre a organização e seus stakeholders.
... When AHP is evaluated by a single stakeholder, the method allows evaluation of the effect of the multi-criteria hierarchy on the final choice compared to a traditional choice based on a single criterion (i.e. a cost evaluation). Moreover, when AHP is evaluated by all of the main stakeholders, the method permits each evaluation to be combined to reach a compromise solution that has the strong potential to become, through a number of participative iterations, a shared solution (Simons and Wiegel 2009). It is also possible to evaluate the impact of the main weaknesses of AHP in regard to the context of gas flaring reduction. ...
During recent years, the issue of gas flaring has become an increasingly relevant problem for the international community. The claim to more sustainable development offers a renewed prospective in the observation of gas flaring and emphasizes that recovering the associated gas could induce economic, environmental and social benefit. The true core of the issue, as is widely accepted, is not a lack of appropriate technologies, but in the number of criteria involved, which makes it difficult to identify a list of alternatives and connecting all the involved stakeholders in the negotiation process. The complexity of this problem can be mitigated using a decision-making method. The objective of the present work is to identify and formulate a supportive decision system based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process. Application of the model to a real case underlines the strengths and weaknesses of the model, leading to the conclusion that a selection of the most sustainable alternatives needs to be based on a number of criteria that need to be recognized and agreed amongst the stakeholders.
... AHP was considered as a suitable multi-criteria decision making technique to estimate the weights of the subcomponents of the ten themes of MPAT. In the process, multi-stakeholders responses on multiple dimensions of poverty were quantified (Simons and Wiegel 2009). The five major steps of quantification process using MPAT are data collection, valuation, estimation of the weighted average (arithmetic and geometric) and thematic index development. ...
The rural mountain communities have long faced challenges from a range of social, economic, political and environmental factors and the threat from these factors has only intensified due to the current climate change. This study was conducted in South Sikkim, a mountain region located in the Indian Eastern Himalaya, to get a deeper insight of the multitude of barriers and stresses that a poor rural mountain community experiences. The purpose of the study was to get community’s perception on the kind of interventions that they consider important to lift them out of poverty and enhance their resilience to manage climate risk. The analysis is based on focus group discussions and household survey, using a multidimensional poverty assessment tool. The study highlights that the vulnerability of the study region to climate change is not concentrated to physical or geographical factors alone, but mostly to the socio-economic factors like lack of access to education, health care, limited livelihood opportunities, limited resources, etc. People consider that these non-climatic factors act as barriers for them to overcome poverty, contribute to their weak resilience, and make it extremely difficult for them to manage the risk posed by climate change. The study therefore suggests that it is of utmost importance that the interventions are planned in ways that address the multidimensional poverty in the region which in turn will enhance community’s inherent capacity to adapt to current as well as future climate risk.
The goal of this paper is to provide a fast and effective restoration scheme after a fault happened in a distribution network. Many centralized strategies have been proposed to address this multi-objective problem, while in this paper, we present a proper function-decoupling approach by multi-agent system (MAS) to search the optimal restoration solution. The proposed three-layer agent framework decouples the procedure of generating switch operating sequence. We regard each objective function as a single agent, which are: 1) Agent 1 to maximize the amount of loads served; 2) Agent 2 to minimize switching operations; and 3) Agent 3 to minimize power loss. As the most prioritized goal is to restore loads as much as possible, we put Agent 1 in the primary layer. Applying the improved genetic algorithm, a solution set representing feasible reconfiguration topologies with maximum recovered loads can be generated. The secondary layer, consisting of Agent 2 and Agent 3, is to filter solution(s). Agent 2 is achieved by comparing the switch status before and after the reconfiguration, and Agent 3 is to calculate the power loss. Parallel computing of Agent 2 and Agent 3 is feasible to improve computational efficiency. Finally, the third layer is for coordinating each solution. With the Pareto Principle and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) applied, the optimal switching operation sequence can be chosen.
For many years, the selection of transportation routes, design of roadway features, etc. were based mostly on engineering considerations. According to the Maryland State Highway Administration, "Context sensitive design asks questions first about the need and purpose of the transportation project, and then equally addresses safety, mobility, and the preservation of scenic, aesthetic, historic, envi-ronmental, and other community values. Context sensitive design involves a collaborative, interdisci-plinary approach in which citizens are part of the design team." QFD has developed since the 1960s a powerful tool set for new product development that enables engineers to listen to the Voice of the Customer and translate the most important needs into design requirements and then assure their qual-ity in the resulting goods and services. This paper will show how QFD tools can be adapted for Con-text Sensitive Solutions and Design in road building and other large projects.
The analytic hierarchy process AHP is flawed as a procedure for ranking alternatives in that the rankings produced by this procedure are arbitrary. This paper provides a brief review of several areas of operational difficulty with the AHP, and then focuses on the arbitrary rankings that occur when the principle of hierarchic composition is assumed. This principle requires that the weights on the higher levels of a hierarchy can be determined independently of the weights on the lower levels. Virtually all of the published examples of the use of the AHP to evaluate alternatives relative to a set of criteria have assumed this principle. The key to correcting this flaw is the synthesis of the AHP with the concepts of multiattribute utility theory.
Verbal statements are intuitively attractive for preference elicitation. In the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) the verbal responses to pairwise comparisons of relative importance are converted into real numbers according to the nine-point integer scale. Several alternative scales have been proposed for the conversion, but sufficient empirical evidence has not been produced to support the choice among these scales. We performed a comparative study in which subjects were requested to quantify verbal ratio statements by adjusting the heights of visually displayed bars. Subjects were also asked to employ verbal expressions in pairwise comparisons of areas of figures with different shapes. The principal result of the experiment was that the perceived meaning of the verbal expressions varies from one subject to the next and also depends on the set of elements involved in the comparison. Our results indicate that there are alternative numerical scales which yield more accurate estimates than the usual 1-to-9 scale and reduce the inconsistency of the comparison matrices. Alternative ways of using verbal preference statements are suggested to overcome the difficulties that arise from the context dependence of verbal pairwise comparisons.
In order to ensure that engineering design is conducted as a rational process producing the best possible results given the context of the activity, a mathematics of design is needed. It is possible to develop such a mathematics based on the recognition that engineering design is a decision-making intensive process and adapting theories from other fields, such as economics and decision theory. We present here eight axioms and derive from them two theorems, which underlie the mathematics of design. Then we present a third theorem that, in the context of the axioms presented, imposes severe conditions upon design methodologies. Together, the axioms and theorems provide a framework that enables the development of a normative theory of design. This theory is applied to a simple example. The results, while intuitively obvious, are substantially different from the results of a "conventional" engineering design analysis.
In this paper we apply multiattribute value theory as a framework for examining the use of pairwise comparisons in the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). On one hand our analysis indicates that pairwise comparisons should be understood in terms of preference differences between pairs of alternatives. On the other hand it points out undesirable effects caused by the upper bound and the discretization of any given ratio scale. Both these observations apply equally well to the SMART procedure which also uses estimates of weight ratios. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the AHP can be modified so as to produce results similar to those of multiattribute value measurement; we also propose new balanced scales to improve the sensitivity of the AHP ratio scales. Finally we show that the so-called supermatrix technique does not eliminate the rank reversal phenomenon which can be attributed to the normalizations in the AHP.
A comprehensive guide to developing and implementing watershed management plans. This book focuses on critical management issues such as resource planning, stakeholder involvement, decision-making methods, cost-benefit analysis, environmental and social impact assessment. The contents include: The watershed inventory; Problem definition and scoping; The consultation process; Developing workable management options; Simple assessment methods; Detailed assessment methods; Costing and financing; Legal, institutional, and administrative concerns; Environmental and social impact assessment; Choosing the best plan; Implementing the plan.