Consistency of the decision-maker in pair-wise comparisons

Most authors assume that the natural behaviour of the decision-maker is being inconsistent. This paper investigates the main sources of inconsistency and analyses methods for reducing or eliminating inconsistency. Decision support systems can contain interactive modules for that purpose. In a system with consistency control, there are three stages. First, consistency should be checked: a consistency measure is needed. Secondly, approval or rejection has to be decided: a threshold value of inconsistency measure is needed. Finally, if inconsistency is ‘high’, corrections have to be made: an inconsistency reducing method is needed. This paper reviews the difficulties in all stages. An entirely different approach is to elaborate a decision support system in order to force the decision-maker to give consistent values in each step of answering pair-wise comparison questions. An interactive questioning procedure resulting in consistent (sub) matrices has been demonstrated

Képzési és kimeneti követelmények: ajánlás

Az új kétszintű magyar felsőoktatási képzési rendszerben is fontos szerepet játszanak a képzési és kimeneti követelmények. Ezek adják meg az alapot a szakindítások megítéléséhez és az intézményi tantervek kidolgozásához. A cikkben a követelményeket hierarchikus rendszerben látjuk jól megvalósíthatónak: az általános és a képzési ágakhoz tartozó leírásokat követik az intézményi szintű szakleírások. Mindezek lényegi eleme a kimeneti oldalra történő koncentrálás, a kompetenciákra építés. A cikk utolsó részében ajánlásokat fogalmazunk meg a képzési és kimeneti követelmények formai megvalósításához

Pairwise comparison matrices: an empirical research

Our research focused on testing various characteristics of pairwise comparison (PC) matrices in controlled experiments. About 270 students have been involved in the test exercises and the final pool contained 450 matrices. Our team conducted experiments with matrices of different size obtained from different types of MADM problems. The matrix elements have been generated by different questioning orders, too. The cases have been divided into 18 subgroups according to the key factors to be analyzed. The testing environment made it possible to analyze the dynamics of inconsistency as the number of elements increased in a given case. Various types of inconsistency indices have been applied. The consequent behavior of the decision maker has also been analyzed in case of incomplete matrices using indicators to measure the deviation from the final ranking of alternatives and from the final score vector