Model World: The Great Debate--MAUT Versus AHP.

MULTIPLE criteria decision making; CHOICE (Psychology); UTILITY theory; ECONOMIC demand; MEASUREMENT

This article presents a comparison between multiattribute utility theory (MAUT) and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). During the 1980s, multicriteria decision-making researchers found that the AHP does not adhere to the basic von Neumann and Morgenstern axiomatic structure of normative utility theory as incorporated in MAUT. The main criticisms of the AHP concern its measurement scale, rank reversal, and transitivity of preferences. The measurement scale is used for measuring the importance of one criterion over another or the preference of one alternative with respect to another evaluated against a criterion. Rank reversal occurs when, after the decision maker (DM) ranks the given set of alternatives, the DM adds a new, irrelevant alternative to the set.