Reasoning Under Uncertainty During Pre-Negotiations Using a Fuzzy AHP

The paper proposes a new approach for tackling the uncertainty and imprecision of the reasoning process while using decision support tools during prenegotiations. The pre-negotiation problem is regarded as decision making under uncertainty, based on multiple criteria of quantitative and qualitative nature, where the imprecise decision-maker’s judgments are represented as fuzzy numbers. A new fuzzy modification of the Analytic Hierarchy Process is applied as an evaluation technique. The proposed fuzzy prioritization method uses fuzzy pairwise comparison judgments rather than exact numerical values of the comparison ratios and transforms the initial fuzzy prioritization problem into a non-linear program. Unlike the known fuzzy prioritization techniques, the proposed method derives crisp weights from consistent and inconsistent fuzzy comparison matrices, which eliminates the need of additional aggregation and ranking procedures. A detailed numerical example, illustrating the application of the approach to services evaluation is given.