The Analytic Hierarchy Process and the Theory of Measurement

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (Saaty 1977, 1980) is a decision-making procedure for establishing priorities in multi-criteria decision making. Underlying the AHP is the theory of ratio-scale measures developed by psychophysicist Stanley S. Stevens (1946, 1951) in the middle of the last century. It is however well-known that Stevens’ original model was flawed in various respects. We reconsider the AHP at the light of the modern theory of measurement based on the so-called separable representations (Narens 1996, Luce 2002). We provide various theoretical and empirical results on the extent to which the AHP can be considered a reliable decision-making procedure in terms of the modern theory of subjective measurement.