Some Notes on Inconsistence and Indecisiveness in the Analytic Hierarchy Process

The aim of the article is to introduce a mathematical concept of indecisiveness into the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) framework. Indecisiveness can be useful in two ways: first, decision makers with high indecisiveness (higher than a given threshold value) can be excluded from a decision making process in its early stages as low-competent and replaced by other, more competent DMs; second, indecisiveness along with consistency index C.I. can be used for the calculation of (aposteriori) DMs’ weights without any additional information about DMs’ age, formal knowledge, social status, etc. The proposed approach is demonstrated on examples.