Once the hierarchy is composed the technique allows for comparing pairs of sub-problems against each other rather than trying to immediately prioritize them in a serial fashion. If you have participating in any of the on-line profiling tools (that many dating sites provide for free) you will recognize the technique: rather than ask you to rank your likes/dislikes, you are given pairs of choices: "Do you prefer a candlelit dinner or night at the movies?", "do you prefer night at the movies or going to a club?", etc.
After pairing each factor against the others, the technique allows you to calculate their exact weights so that you can now score your options using these weights. E.g.: If your dating preferences ended up as follows:
- Candlelit dinner: 80%
- Night at the movies: 15%
- Going to a club: 5%
For a hands-on example of AHP in deciding which job offer to accept, read this example walk-thru and you will quickly understand the concepts at hand. The example is about an employee, Peter, who is mulling over 4 job offers. Rather than decide between the 4 companies he considers factors such as location, salary, job, content and long-term prospects and leverages AHP to formalize the relative importance.
To simplify the calculation of the AHP weights I created a template spreadsheet available for free download:
- Click to download AHP spreadsheet (Updated 11/12/2008)
3 comments:
Interesting use of the AHP method...Check out using the Pugh Matrix too...It uses the AHP informaiton to expand the decsion making process.
I think it is easier to use AHP dedicated tool like AHPproject
Another AHP tool - MakeItRational (AHPproject 2.0)
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