Sampling of pairwise comparisons in decision-making

Various decision-making techniques rely on pairwise comparisons (PCs) between the involved elements. Traditionally, PCs are provided by experts or relevant actors, and compiled into pairwise comparison matrices (PCMs). In highly complex problems, the number of elements to be compared may be very large. One of the issues limiting PC applicability to large-scale decision problems is the so-called curse of dimensionality, that is, many PCs need to be elicited from an actor, or built from a body of information. In general, when applied to a set of n elements to be compared, the number of PCs that have to be made is n(n−1)/2. When the information in the comparison matrix is complete, the priorit…