Visualizing group decisions in the analytic hierarchy process

Over the past 25 years, the analytic hierarchy process has been applied by groups of decision makers to problems in the private and public sectors. Typically, group decision making is much more difficult than the case involving a single decision maker. Each group member brings a different academic training, socio-economic background, agenda, bias, and ego to the process. Participants may view group members as friends, allies, or foes. Some participants may have more power in the organization than others, so that strong and weak voices may not be heard equally. Furthermore, group members may conceal true agendas or try to distort their pairwise comparisons. In this paper, we present a technique that can be used to visualize the priority vectors of decision makers. This technique should help decision makers to make judgments more objectively. As a result, the group is more likely to function as a cohesive team with a common goal.