Using an expert critiquing system for improving construction technology diffusion decisions

Contractors operating in various highly competitive construction markets, are with the problem of deciding on the feasibility and timing of investing in newly emerging construction technologies. The decision environment can be simply described as one requiring that the drives favoring the technological change be weighed against the possible impediments that may be present. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a methodology for decision making that assists in solving complex problems involving many criteria using the knowledge, expertise, and judgment of the decision maker. In the AHP evaluation procedure, contractors are asked to provide judgments on the elements of the hierarchy as to their relative importance with respect to a higher-level criterion or property. Decisions are significantly sensitive to the judgmental inputs used in quantifying the relative importance, likelihood, and preference of the identified criteria. Therefore, contractors considering the feasibility of diffusing a new technology may have cognitive biases inherent in their intuitive judgment. An expert critiquing is used to help overcome these biases in the AHP evaluation procedure. The main objective of this paper is to introduce the theory of expert critiquing systems and how it is applied to the technology transfer and diffusion problem.