Consensus Building in AHP-Group Decision Making: A Bayesian Approach

This paper examines consensus building in AHP-group decision making from a Bayesian perspective. In accordance with the multicriteria procedural rationality paradigm, the methodology employed in this study permits the automatic identification, in a local context, of “agreement” and “disagreement” zones among the actors involved. This approach is based on the analysis of the pairwise comparison matrices provided by the actors themselves. In addition, the study integrates the attitudes of the actors implicated in the decision-making process and puts forward a number of semiautomatic initiatives for establishing consensus. This information is given to the actors as the first step in the negotiation processes. The knowledge obtained will be incorporated into the system via the learning process developed during the resolution of the problem. The proposed methodology, valid for the analysis of incomplete or imprecise pairwise comparison matrices, is illustrated by an example.