Identifying strategic management concepts: An analytic network process approach
Computers and Industrial Engineering
Journal of Systems and Software
Looking for a good fuzzy system interpretability index: An experimental approach
International Journal of Approximate Reasoning
Construction of candidate topologies for large-scale networks
GLOBECOM'09 Proceedings of the 28th IEEE conference on Global telecommunications
Efficiently constructing candidate set for network topology design
ICC'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international conference on Communications
Editorial: Special issue on interpretable fuzzy systems
Information Sciences: an International Journal
The pairwise comparison model: the multiplicative and the additive approach
MDAI'06 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence
A multi-methodological approach for shipping registry selection in maritime transportation industry
Mathematical and Computer Modelling: An International Journal
An extension of TOPSIS for group decision making
Mathematical and Computer Modelling: An International Journal
Membership maximization prioritization methods for fuzzy analytic hierarchy process
Fuzzy Optimization and Decision Making
Human Capital valuation and return of investment on corporate education
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
A Method for Ranking Non-Linear Qualitative Decision Preferences using Copulas
International Journal of Decision Support System Technology
Designing data center network by analytic hierarchy process
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
COMMA: A Result-Oriented Composite Autocompletion Method for E-marketplaces
WI-IAT '12 Proceedings of the The 2012 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 01
Web Intelligence and Agent Systems
Hi-index | 0.98 |
In 1956, Miller [1] conjectured that there is an upper limit on our capacity to process information on simultaneously interacting elements with reliable accuracy and with validity. This limit is seven plus or minus two elements. He noted that the number 7 occurs in many aspects of life, from the seven wonders of the world to the seven seas and seven deadly sins. We demonstrate in this paper that in making preference judgments on pairs of elements in a group, as we do in the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), the number of elements in the group should be no more than seven. The reason is founded in the consistency of information derived from relations among the elements. When the number of elements increases past seven, the resulting increase in inconsistency is too small for the mind to single out the element that causes the greatest inconsistency to scrutinize and correct its relation to the other elements, and the result is confusion to the mind from the existing information. The AHP as a theory of measurement has a basic way to obtain a measure of inconsistency for any such set of pairwise judgments. When the number of elements is seven or less the inconsistency measurement is relatively large with respect to the number of elements involved; when the number is more it is relatively small. The most inconsistent judgment is easily determined in the first case and the individual providing the judgments can change it in an effort to improve the overall inconsistency. In the second case, as the inconsistency measurement is relatively small, improving inconsistency requires only small perturbations and the judge would be hard put to determine what that change should be, and how such a small change could be justified for improving the validity of the outcome. The mind is sufficiently sensitive to improve large inconsistencies but not small ones. And the implication of this is that the number of elements in a set should be limited to seven plus or minus two.