# 195

Dear Mustafa seçkin Şalvarlı

I read your paper

Determining social media marketing tools using AHP method in evaluating digital marketing initiatives

My comments”

1- “The primary objective of this research is to utilize the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to strategically evaluate and select optimal social media marketing tools tailored for businesses.”

It is really surprising for me that you want to optimize, something most normally impossible in MCDM, let alone using AHP, with assumed weights without any mathematical support

2- Page 2 “a robust multi-criteria decision-making framework, offers a systematic approach to navigate this complexity”

I ask you, how a method can be robust if it is based on intuitions?

3- Page 2 “Sensitivity analysis in the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) plays a pivotal role in enhancing the robustness and credibility of decision-making frameworks, particularly in the strategic evaluation and selection of social media marketing tools

Sensitivity analysis (SA) in AHP is flawed because:

a- Considers only one criterion for variation ignoring the others, what is known as OAT (one at a time) as well as selecting the criterion according the one in the set with the highest weight, with no mathematical support, although intuitively may appear correct. Since a MCDM problem including alternatives and criteria is a system, the use of OAT is incorrect. It should consider ALL criteria at the same time,as well as the influence or relationship between criteria.

b- The process adds increasing values arbitrarily, because the DM does not know if the criterion accepts that variation. It has a mathematical explanation but common sense indicates that this is wrong. It is as pretending to store an increasing number of different objects in a box, but ignoring if the box has the appropriate capacity.

4- Page 2 “transparency of the AHP methodology by revealing the sensitivity of results to changes in input values “

Transparency? When the DM estimates may be forcefully ‘corrected’ by a formula?

5- Page 4 “The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a structured decision-making framework that facilitates rational and informed evaluationsacross various criteria”

Rational? Where is rationality in AHP, working with absurd quantitative estimates of one criterion on another

Is it rational not to consider the resources needed for a project?

Is it rational to think that what is in the mind of the DM applies to the real-world

Do you know what Saaty, the creator of AHP said?

He referred to that point and said that it is only an assumption, acknowledging that the transitive weights may not represent real-life

6- Page 4 “This methodology enhances transparency and objectivity in the selection process by employing

Curiously, you talk about objectivity when AHP is fundamentally a subjective method

7- Page 4 “AHPs iterative pairwise comparison method fosters a transparent decision-making”

The fact that you compare pairs of criteria does not mean that the method is iterative. This term means than a process is repeated in a series of continues steps, where each one is based on the former, and trying to converge to the best solution, and as far as I know, AHP does not do that.

8- Page 4 “AHP facilitates a comparative assessment of various tools based on strategic criteria such as effectiveness, cost-efficiency, and user engagement potential”

I do not think that these three criteria are independent, since effectiveness is linked with cost-efficiency. Consequently, AHP is not the most appropriate method for your scenario, since it demands independence of criteria, that you do not have here.

10- Page 4 “Additionally, the application of AHP can integrate qualitative factors that are often overlooked in traditional selection methods, thus aligning with strategic goals more effectively (Munier & Hontoria, 2021)”

I do not remember writing this paragraph in my book, as you claim, especially the underlined part of the paragraph

11- Page 4 “effectively encapsulating expert opinions while minimizing biased”

And how do you minimize these biases? If you detect one, just eliminate it

12- Page 4 “the AHP algorithm calculates the priority vectors, which rank the alternatives according to their overall importance”

This is incorrect for the so called weights are only trade-offs value, that cannot be used to evaluate alternatives. They do not have that capacity because they are not ranked per discrimination of values within each criterion. That is done by entropy with a theorem to support that

13- Page 4 “the key criteria against which the tools will be evaluated must be defined. These were determined in the study as follows”

Not really, it is the opposite, for you cannot define criteria if you do not know the alternatives they must evaluate. Yes, I know that it is the AHP procedure, but in my opinion that precedence of criteria before alternatives, does not have sense.

These are my comments. I am not reviewing, judging or criticizing your article, only expressing my opinions, but frankly, there are many misconceptions, and got the impression that I was reading a commercial advertisement for AHP, instead of a technical paper

I hope that my comments can be of help

Nolberto Munier