Deriving weights from general pairwise comparison matrices

The problem of deriving weights from pairwise comparison matrices has been treated extensively in the literature. Most of the results are devoted to the case when the matrix under consideration is reciprocally symmetric (i.e., the i, j-th element of the matrix is reciprocal to its j, i-th element for each i and j). However, there are some applications of the framework when the underlying matrices are not reciprocally symmetric. In this paper we employ both statistical and axiomatic arguments to derive weights from such matrices. Both of these approaches lead to geometric mean-type approximations. Numerical comparison of the obtained geometric mean-type solutions with Saaty's eigenvector method is provided also. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.