A Thurstonian view of the analytic hierarchy process

The application of deterministic decision models in situations characterized by noise and uncertainty is likely to produce results of questionable value. In this paper, some very simple probabilistic models are developed and substituted for the deterministic scales used in the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). It is shown that the use of these probabilistic models can extend the domain of AHP to situations, such as consensual or group decision making, that possess significant amounts of uncertainty. In addition, explicit measures of the variation present in the evaluation of decision alternatives and attributes are obtained.