Strategic manipulation in group decisions with pairwise comparisons: A game theoretical perspective

We discuss the issue of strategic manipulation in group decision-making via pairwise comparisons. Pair -wise comparisons play a pivotal role in the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Although there is a large amount of literature on its application to group decisions, very little attention has been paid to the strategic issue: a group decision can be biased by strategically dishonest individuals. We aim to draw attention to the problem and provide a formal perspective to deal with it. We consider a scenario of group decision-making where the inputs are the individuals' pairwise preferences and the outcome is in their interest. We formulate this situation as a strategic game where the individuals decide how to submit their pairwise preferences. Theoretical results show that truthful reporting can be a dominant strategy only in very limited situations, and moreover it is often weakly dominated.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )