Prioritization of hesitant multiplicative preference relations based on data envelopment analysis for group decision making

Hesitant multiplicative preference relations (HMPRs) are utilized to describe situations where a decision maker gives several possible values by Saaty’s 1-9 scale in pairwise comparison. For further applications of HMPRs, this paper develops two priority methods based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) for group decision making. These methods include self-weight prioritization and the cross-weight prioritization, which are similar to the self-evaluation efficiency and the cross-evaluation efficiency in DEA theory, respectively. We prove that both of them can generate true priority weights for consistent HMPRs. The mechanisms of these proposed methods are illustrated with numerical examples. Also, comparisons with other methods are performed to show the advantages of the proposed methods.