Remarks about geometric scale in the analytic hierarchy process

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is perhaps the most popular approach to decision-making problems of prioritization. The basis of the AHP is pairwise comparison, which is used to compare alternatives. This comparisons are provided by decision makers usually as linguistic expressions which are next converted to numbers from a fixed set called a scale. The influence of the scale on the quality of prioritization was investigated in a number of papers. One of the most important types of judgment scale is the Geometric Scale. Its elements depend on specific parameters. In this paper, the impact of the choice of this scale’s parameters on errors in priority vectors and on values of the inconsistency indices is studied via Monte Carlo simulations.