The journal 4OR - A Quarterly Journal of Operations Research (Springer Nature, 70pkt MEiN, IF: 2.0) has published a new paper co-authored by Department staff members Dominik Strzałka, Bartosz Kowal and Pawel Kuras.
The paper is titled : Is the best-worst method path dependent? Evidence from an empirical study, and was written in collaboration with staff from a total of four universities, where more than 800 people were surveyed to give credence to and study a new decision-making method - BWM.
Paper abstract:
The Best-Worst Method (BWM) is one of the newest methods of pairwise comparisons. As the name suggests, it is based on pairwise comparisons of all criteria (or possibly other objects, such as alternatives, sub-criteria, etc.) with respect to the best (most important) and worst (least important) criterion. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the path and scale dependence of BWM. To date, it is not known whether the weights of compared objects obtained by the method differ when objects are compared first with the best object and then with the worst object, or vice versa. It is also unknown whether the results of the method differ when the compared objects are presented in a different order or when different scales are used. Therefore, an experiment was conducted under laboratory conditions with more than 800 respondents, university students from two countries, in which respondents compared the areas of randomly generated figures, and then the relative size of the objects was estimated using a linearized version of the BWM. Finally, the accuracy of the BWM is tested against various comparison scales, including Saaty's nine-point linguistic scale, a total scale from 1 to 9, and a continuous scale from 1 to infinity.
Citation:
Mazurek, J., Perzina, R., Strzałka, D. et al. Is the best-worst method path dependent? Evidence from an empirical study. 4OR-Q J Oper Res (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10288-023-00553-5
Article available at link:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10288-023-00553-5
