A method for dealing with inconsistencies in pairwise comparisons

The Pairwise Comparison method is a powerful inference tool for assessing the relative importance of a set of items. Formally, its objective is to make compatible decision maker's assignments (paired comparison) with properties needed for obtaining an overall rank. In this paper, we propose a distance-based framework for analysing this kind of compatibility. In this context, Goal Programming is proposed as an attractive and flexible tool.