A multicriteria evaluation of methods for obtaining weights from ratio-scale matrices

Ratio-scale matrices are commonly used as a vehicle to distinguish among competing alternatives or conflicting criteria. The issue of extracting weights out of such matrices has attracted increasing attention in recent years and resulted in the development of several scaling methods. This paper presents an attempt to evaluate some of the more known techniques in this area. The evaluation procedure includes random generation of a large number of representative matrices which are used to evaluate the various scaling methods according to the specified criteria. The performance of the different techniques is analyzed with respect to the proposed criteria and conclusions are drawn.