An Empirical Study of Equivalence Judgments vs. Ratio Judgments in Decision Analysis *

Two commonly used elicitation modes on strength of preference, equivalence and ratio judgments, were compared in an experiment. The result from the experiment showed that ratio judgments were less effective than equivalence judgments. Based on an iterative design for eliciting multiattribute preference structures, equivalence judgments outperformed ratio judgments in estimating single‐attribute measurable value functions, while being nearly more effective than ratio judgments in assessing multiattribute preference structures. The implications of the results from the experiment are that multiattribute decision‐making techniques should take advantage of the decision maker's inclination of making effective equivalence trade‐off judgments, and that useful techniques should be devised to incorporate different commonly used techniques, such as multiattribute utility theory and the Analytic Hierarchy Process, to elicit and consolidate equivalence trade‐off judgments.