The Voting Analytic Hierarchy Process revisited: A revised method with application to sustainable supplier selection

Abstract

Civil society increasingly holds focal companies accountable for ensuring socially and environmentally sustainable production standards among their supply base. These standards entail increased levels of complexity to be addressed by appropriately designed tools, such as the Voting Analytic Hierarchy Process (VAHP) proposed by Liu and Hai (2005). This method of multi-criteria group decision making structures decision criteria in a hierarchical fashion as per Saaty's Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and employs data envelopment analysis (DEA) for deriving criteria weights from the ordinal preferences of the group members. Compared to AHP, the method permits a simpler application in a group decision context. However, its theoretical underpinnings have been questioned in the literature. This specifically concerns (i) the requirement of a strong convex order for the importance weights of ordinal rank gradations, and (ii) the choice of discrimination threshold for consecutive rank weights in the underlying DEA model. We propose a revised VAHP method that overcomes both issues (i) and (ii) by pursuing a game-theoretic approach to elicitation of criteria weights-so as to remove subjectivity from rank discrimination. We illustrate the application of the method on a real-world problem of sustainable supplier selection. We contribute to theory by proposing a more robust VAHP tool that helps supply chain and purchasing managers selecting suppliers based on a comprehensive set of criteria spanning all three sustainability dimensions (economic, environmental, and social), while coping with parsimonious input by group decisionmakers.

Tensions in sustainable warehousing: including the blue-collar perspective on automation and ergonomic workplace design

“…In recent years, the AHP has increasingly been applied to sustainability-related issues (e.g., Pishchulov et al 2019). The AHP (Saaty 1986(Saaty , 2001(Saaty , 2008 was developed as a performance measurement tool that calculates ratio scales based on discrete and continuous paired comparisons.…”

“…2 Generally, AHP studies already yield sensible results with few participants (cf., Whitaker 2007) while smaller samples are quite common in extant literature (e.g., Peterson et al 1994;Al-Harbi 2001;Pishchulov et al 2019). It is more decisive for the reliability of the AHP results that the alternatives are defined crisply as well as to assure the homogeneity of the participant group (Schmidt et al 2016).…”

Remanufacturing Aided Upgrading of Universal Testing Machine through Sustainability Assessment Modeling

“…More robust tool can be developed to be exploited for sustainable alternative selection. Game theory can be used so that suffering issues can be overcome by pursuing an approach to elicit weights of criteria through removing subjectivity from rank discrimination [11].…”

‘For the English to see’ or effective change? How supply chains are shaped by laws and regulations, and what that means for the exposure of modern slavery

“…In a procurement decision the criteria of supplier selection are usually weighted relative to their importance. Empirical work has shown that practitioners tend to reduce the importance of a particular issue in their supplier selection process if it is already covered by strong legislation which mitigates risk of that issue occurring in a supplier (Pishchulov et al 2019). The responsibility for policing supply chains may therefore be a useful tool to fill a gap left by an absent or insufficient state actor.…”