A natural way to make momentous decisions

A brief introduction to making decisions by the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is given. A simple illustration of how to decide on which of three people should get a heart transplant is provided. How to structure a decision problem and how to enter judgments semantically, transform them to paired comparisons, and derive a ratio scale of relative values from them are examined. The role and measurement of inconsistency are discussed along with brief comments on work done on probabilistically distributed judgments. Two applications illustrating both relative measurement and absolute measurement of alternatives in making a decision by the AHP are given.