FINANCIAL CUTBACK DECISIONS BY PRIORITY SCALING

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Abstract
This paper reports the application of the priority scaling method to financial cutback decisions in a social services organization, and provides an overview of the priority scaling method.The method is used to elicit a weighted scale of individual and group priorities between options from paired‐comparison exercises, together with a measure of internal consistency of judgment. The weighted scale of option priorities may be adjusted to align with the relative values individuals and groups assign to the multiple criteria which guide their judgments, and a measure of internal coherence of judgment obtained. Decision‐makers’ allocations of resources may be inferred from their priority weightings together with budgets for each option. Applying the method in reverse, decision‐makers’ implied priorities may be directly inferred from proposed budget cuts. A set of reliability tests are incorporated in rigorous versions of the method.