Decision Making with the Analytic Network Process: Economic, Political, Social and Technological Applications with Benefits, Opportunities, Costs and Risks

The Analytic Network Process (ANP), developed by Thomas Saaty in his work on multicriteria decision making, applies network structures with dependence and feedback to complex decision making. This new edition of Decision Making with the Analytic Network Process is a selection of the latest applications of ANP to economic, social and political decisions, and also to technological design. The ANP is a methodological tool that is helpful to organize knowledge and thinking, elicit judgments registered in both in memory and in feelings, quantify the judgments and derive priorities from them, and finally synthesize these diverse priorities into a single mathematically and logically justifiable overall outcome. In the process of deriving this outcome, the ANP also allows for the representation and synthesis of diverse opinions in the midst of discussion and debate. The book focuses on the application of the ANP in three different areas: economics, the social sciences and the linking of measurement with human values. Economists can use the ANP for an alternate approach for dealing with economic problems than the usual mathematical models on which economics bases its quantitative thinking. For psychologists, sociologists and political scientists, the ANP offers the methodology they have sought for some time to quantify and derive measurements for intangibles.  Finally the book applies the ANP to provide people in the physical and engineering sciences with a quantitative method to link hard measurement to human values.  In such a process, one is able to interpret the true meaning of measurements made on a uniform scale using a unit.

Table of Contents:
The Analytic Network Process.- Forecasting the Resurgence of the U.S. Economy in 2001: An Expert Judgement Approach.- An Analytic Network Process Model for Financial-Crisis Forecasting.- Outsourcing a Firm's Application Development Group.- ANWR: Artic National Wildlife Refuge, an ANP Validation Example.- The Ford Explorer Case.- Synthesis of Complex Criteria Decision Making: A Case Towards a Consensus Agreement for a Middle East Conflict Resolution.- U.S. Energy Security.- Stabilizing Social Security for the Long-Term.- When Shall Poland Enter the Euro Zone?.- The Conflict between China and Taiwan.- U.S. Response to North Korean Nuclear Threat.- Criteria for Evaluating Group Decision-Making Methods.- An Innovative Orders-of-Magnitude Approach to AHP-Based Multicriteria Decision Making: Prioritizing Divergent Intangible Humane Acts.- Sensitivity Analysis in the Analytic Hierarchy Process.