THE SENSITIVITY OF THE ANALYTIC HIERARCHY PROCESS TO ALTERNATIVE SCALE AND CUE PRESENTATIONS

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has gained prominence in the acco unting literature as a method to model the decisions of experts, Also, the AHP is used to help individuals structure decisions. AHP research ers have several choices when constructing AHP instruments that elicit judgments from participants; however, little guidance is available re garding the 'best' choice, In particular, the AHP response scale can b e numerical, verbal, or graphical, Paired comparisons can be presented in a random or nonrandom format, or in a top-down or bottom-up order. This paper reports the results of three related experiments investiga ting whether differences in the scale used or the format order of pair ed comparisons yields significant differences in the AHP models. The r esults offer some evidence that the scale used is associated with diff erent AHP models, Also, some evidence is provided that the random vers us nonrandom format of the paired-comparison presentation is associate d with different AHP models. However, the results for the scale and fo rmat effects are not evident across all experiments.