JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 169.230.Abstract. Saaty's Analytic Hierarchical Process is one of the most commonly used methods of prioritizing the elemental issues in a complex problem. This paper goes some way towards overcoming some objections to the method and offers an explanation as to why the method is more suitable for simple prioritization rather than for the much more useful task of the quantification and weightings for the issues. It suggests a strategy for overcoming this limitation and, incidentally, indicates how the application of the method might be extended to cater for the case of judgements determined by consensus among a panel rather than by a single individual.

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SUMMARY Prioritization strategies characterized by pairwise comparison provide some inconsistency on the part of the decision maker. Such a tolerance is desirable and even necessary given the imprecise nature of human decision‐making processes. Methods based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) of T. L. Saaty have to date used a somewhat arbitrary measure of consistency. A consideration of the distributions of randomly generated judgment matrices highlights the need for greater refinement. This paper illustrates the problem as manifested in both the AHP and the modified AHP and points the way to a solution in harmony with acknowledged statistical procedures.