A MULTICRITERIA EVALUATION OF METHODS FOR OBTAINING WEIGHTS FROM RATIO-SCALE MATRICES

Ratio-scale matrices are commonly used as a vehicle to distinguish amo ng competing alternatives or conflicting criteria. The issue of extrac ting weights out of such matrices has attracted increasing attention i n recent years and resulted in the development of several scaling meth ods. This paper presents an attempt to evaluate some of the more known techniques in this area. The evaluation procedure includes random gen eration of a large number of representative matrices which are used to evaluate the various scaling methods according to the specified crite ria. The performance of the different techniques is analyzed with resp ect to the proposed criteria and conclusions are drawn.