Diminishing Utility Decision Model for Weighting Criteria

The analytic hierarchy/network process (analytic hierarchy process (AHP)/analytic network process (ANP)) became the most popular tool for weighting criteria in the field of multiple criteria analysis during the 1980s. However, these models often suffer from criticisms because of their theoretical and practical problems. In this paper, the diminishing utility decision model (DUDM) is proposed in order to retain the pros and avoid the cons of the AHP and ANP for weighting criteria. The DUDM integrates the AHP and the concept of diminishing marginal utility in order to model the main and interaction weights of criteria, respectively. From the results of the numerical examples, it can be seen that the proposed method can solve two major limitations of the ANP. First, the proposed method can significantly reduce the number of questions that are asked in the ANP. Second, the proposed method can ensure convergence in many situations and avoid the problem of the ANP with regard to the absorbing state.