Opinion profiling and decision making through analytic hierarchies

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the notion of opinion profiling as an aid to decision making in the hierarchical modelling of expert opinion. An easily understood hierarchy of small dimension, taken from the fire safety investigation by Shields et al. (1986) is shown. Decision makers had to determine a priority norm for the safety components in the lowest level of the hierarchy relative to the global policy of fire safety, so that various surveyed alternatives could be evaluated. Several techniques of multi-attribute utility theory are available for this purpose and each has its rigorous underpinning, but two methods that have intuitive appeal and that have been researched by the author and presented in this paper