5. Structuring the Hierarchy to Make Trade-Offs: Benefits, Costs, Perceived Benefits, and Perceived Costs

(a) They had no way to measure the importance and value of intangible factors which can dominate the process; (b) They had no overall unifying structure to organize and prioritize issues and concessions; (c) They had no mechanism to trade off concessions by measuring their worth; (d) They had no way to capture each party’s perception of the other side’s benefits and costs; (e) They had no way to provide confidence for the other party that the opposing party is not gaining more than they are; (f) They had no way to avoid the effect of intense emotions and innuendoes which negatively affect the negotiation process; and (g) They had no way to test the sensitivity and stability of the solution to changes in their judgments with respect to the importance of the factors that determined the best outcome. The AHP is about breaking a problem down and then aggregating the solutions of all the sub-problems into a conclusion. It facilitates decision-making by organizing perceptions, feelings, judgments, and memories into a framework that exhibits the forces that influence a decision.