Abstract
When one estimates the importance of alternatives under rational choice, it is natural to avoid self-contradiction from the viewpoint of psychology. Due to the vagueness encountered in a manner analogous to human thought, decision makers always exhibit limited rationality. The judgements could be expressed as interval-valued comparison matrices within the framework of analytic hierarchy process. In this study, for additive reciprocal matrices (ARMs), three axiomatic properties are proposed to characterize the additive consistency and the multiplicative consistency under fully rational behavior. For interval additive reciprocal matrices (IARMs), the concept of weak consistency is used to capture the limited rationality. By weakening some axiomatic properties of consistent ARMs, the reasonable properties of IARMs with weak consistency are presented. Two kinds of IARMs satisfying the properties of weak consistency are analyzed and some comparisons are offered. It is observed that the consistency of ARMs can be defined exactly and characterized by using the axiomatic properties. The properties of characterizing the consistency degree of IARMs should be captured by weakening the axiomatic ones of consistent ARMs. The proposed approach visualizes the development process starting from cardinal consistency of numeric-valued preference relations to weak consistency of interval-valued comparison matrices.