Observations about consensus seeking in a multiple criteria environment

Abstract

The paper reports a case study where two multiple criteria methods were employed to support consensus seeking in groups of student politicians. In the first group the decision-makers (DM) began the session by using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for their individual decision support, and later on they sought consensus by comparing their final weightings. In the second group the DMs discussed the problem collectively by employing the interval AHP (IAHP), a recently developed extension to the AHP, as a common framework for finding commonly accepted statements about the group's preferences. The outcomes of the sessions and the feedback received from the DMs suggest that the IAHP is less likely to lead to preference anchoring in consensus seeking. >