Can AHP facilitate conflict resolution? Quantitative evidence from role playing in a business engineering class.

The theme of conflict resolution using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is widely examined in scientific literature, but as yet insufficient attention has been paid to the quantitative aspect of AHP contribution. In this paper we aim to quantify AHP helpfulness in conflict negotiations: how much does AHP actually facilitate a conflict resolution and help negotiators to find win-win agreements? Following this lead, we realized a role playing experiment simulating a "Union versus Management" negotiation problem and compared two groups: a control group that negotiated without any structured decision support system and another group that negotiated with the support of AHP. In order to compare the agreements obtained by means of negotiation and AHP, we acted as an arbiter in the AHP decision process, following Saaty’s assumptions on the psychological attitudes of negotiating parties in a conflict. The results showed that AHP agreements are more frequently Pareto-efficient than those achieved by negotiators, and are characterized by higher average utilities.