IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ids/ijmdma/v7y2006i2-3p180-188.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Analytic Hierarchy Process: wash criteria should not be ignored

Author

Listed:
  • Thomas L. Saaty
  • Luis G. Vargas

Abstract

In this short paper it is shown that care is required to perform the appropriate normalisation needed to derive the right set of priorities from paired comparisons when criteria are added or deleted in a decision problem. This is particularly true for criteria with respect to which the alternatives have equal priorities and may be thought by someone to be of no consequence in ranking the alternatives. It is easy to see that small perturbation of the equal values of the alternatives with respect to an overwhelmingly important criterion can make a substantial difference to the final priorities of the alternatives if that criterion, called a wash criterion, is blindly deleted from the set of criteria. Background discussion and examples by some authors who did not examine it in the depth needed to understand its consequences are given to demonstrate how to deal with this artificially concocted idea.

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas L. Saaty & Luis G. Vargas, 2006. "The Analytic Hierarchy Process: wash criteria should not be ignored," International Journal of Management and Decision Making, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 7(2/3), pages 180-188.
    • Handle: RePEc:ids:ijmdma:v:7:y:2006:i:2/3:p:180-188
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=9142
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ardalan Bafahm & Minghe Sun, 2019. "Some Conflicting Results in the Analytic Hierarchy Process," International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making (IJITDM), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 18(02), pages 465-486, March.
    2. Yamkela Jakeni & Thabang Maphanga & Benett Siyabonga Madonsela & Karabo Concelia Malakane, 2024. "Identification of Illegal Dumping and Community Views in Informal Settlements, Cape Town: South Africa," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 16(4), pages 1-17, February.
    3. Lin, Jennifer Shu-Jen & Chou, Shuo-Yan & Chouhuang, Wayne T. & Hsu, C.P., 2008. "Note on "Wash criterion in analytic hierarchy process"," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 185(1), pages 444-447, February.
    4. Vivek Agrawal & Nitin Seth & Jitendra Kumar Dixit, 2022. "A combined AHP–TOPSIS–DEMATEL approach for evaluating success factors of e-service quality: an experience from Indian banking industry," Electronic Commerce Research, Springer, vol. 22(3), pages 715-747, September.
    5. Alessio Ishizaka & Sajid Siraj, 2020. "Interactive consistency correction in the analytic hierarchy process to preserve ranks," Decisions in Economics and Finance, Springer;Associazione per la Matematica, vol. 43(2), pages 443-464, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ids:ijmdma:v:7:y:2006:i:2/3:p:180-188. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sarah Parker (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalID=19 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.