12. Expressing Our Preferences with the Use of AHP: The Game Is not Worth the Candle?

Multi-criteria decision-making methods are widely used for comparing alternatives when there are multiple objectives. There are many alternative methods differing in their ease of use, validity, results, and appropriateness to resource planning. This chapter describes the results of a laboratory study which investigates preference in decision-making under certainty with multiple conflicting objectives and continuous decision variables. Techniques for solving such problems are taken from the fields of decision analysis and optimization: direct rating technique (SMART-like) and AHP. The purpose of the experiment was to determine the ability of each method to correctly express the decision-maker’s preferences. If multi-criteria methods always support the decision-making process and better reflect to existing pattern of preferences of decision-maker, choices made in the decision-making process, obtained through multi-criteria methods, should be closer than the overall assessment. The results obtained in the experiment indicate that this is not the case. Furthermore, the research shows that the AHP method does not better reflect preferences. The results obtained by the AHP method significantly differ from the results obtained by the direct rating and overall assessment method.