On Intensity of Preference Rank Reversal in the AHP
Authors
Jiri Mazurek
Luis Ángel Calvo
Abstract
The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is one of the most widely used multicriteria decision-making methods, with applications from agriculture to space engineering. Despite its popularity, AHP has been repeatedly criticised for rank reversal, a phenomenon in which the ranking of alternatives changes after the addition or removal of an irrelevant or duplicate alternative.
This paper introduces a new type of rank reversal in AHP, arising when the intensity of preferences is uniformly increased. We show that even when all pairwise preferences preserve their direction and are intensified identically, the eigenvector method may produce a different ordering of alternatives. In contrast, the geometric mean (GM) method is robust to this intensity-of-preference (IOP) rank reversal.
The applicability of this result is shown through a real decision-making problem taken from a NASA manual concerning capability prioritisation for the planned lunar Gateway orbital station.
