Why the AHP Balanced Scale is not balanced

As part of my current work about AHP scales, here an important finding for the balanced scale:

Salo and Hamalainen [1] pointed out that the integers from 1 to 9 yield local weights, which are not equally dispersed. Based on this observation, they proposed a balanced scale, where local weights are evenly dispersed over the weight range [0.1, 0.9]. They state that for a given set of priority vectors the corresponding ratios can be computed from the inverse relationship

r = w / (1 – w)      (1a)

The priorities 0.1, 0.15, 0.2, … 0.8, 0.9 lead, for example, to the scale 1, 1.22, 1.5, 1.86, 2.33, 3.00, 4.00, 5.67 and 9.00. This scale can be computed by

wbal = 0.45 + 0.05 x     (1b)

with x = 1 … 9 and


c ( resp. 1/c) are the entry values in the decision matrix, and x the pairwise comparison judgment on the scale 1 to 9.

In fact, eq. 1a or its inverse are the special case for one selected pairwise comparison of two criteria. If we take into account the complete n x n decision matrix for n criteria, the resulting weights for one criterion, judged as x-times more important than all others, can be calculated as:


Eq. 2 simplifies to eq. 1a for n=2.

With eq. 2 we can formulate the general case for the balanced scale, resulting in evenly dispersed weights for n criteria and a judgment x with x from 1 to M:






We get the general balanced scale (balanced-n) as


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AHP Judgment Scales

The original AHP uses ratio scales. To derive priorities, verbal statements (comparisons) are converted into integers from 1 to 9. This “fundamental AHP scale” has been discussed, as there is no thoretical reason to be restricted to these numbers and verbal gradations. In the past several other numerical scales have been proposed [1],[3]. AHP-OS now supports ten different scales:

  1. Standard AHP linear scale
  2. Logarithmic scale
  3. Root square scale
  4. Inverse linear scale
  5. Balanced scale
  6. Balanced-n scale
  7. Adaptive-bal scale
  8. Adaptive scale
  9. Power scale
  10. Geometric scale

Fig. 1 Mapping of the 1 to 9 input values to the elements of the decision matrix.

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