Deriving weights from pairwise comparison ratio matrices: An axiomatic approach

This paper examines the problem of extracting object or attribute weights from a pairwise comparison ratio matrix. This problem is approached from the point of view of a distance measure on the space of all such matrices. A set of axioms is presented which such a distance measure should satisfy, and the uniqueness of the measure is proven. The problem of weight derivation is then shown to be equivalent to that of finding a totally transitive matrix which is a minimum distance from the given matrix. This problem reduces to a goal programming model. Finally, it is shown that the problem of weight derivation is related to that of ranking players in a round robin tournament. The space of all binary tournament matrices is proven to be isometric to a subset of the space of ratio matrices.