An Application of Analytical Hierarchy Process to Financial Asset Selection

Abstract

Asset selection involves picking up a particular asset within each asset class in such a manner that it would outperform the rest of the assets to maximize the investor’s goal of increasing value while mitigating risk. This paper aims to implement a widely used “multi-criteria decision making (MCDM)” technique known as Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) for best asset selection. In AHP, the qualitative problems are described and transformed quantitatively, and then the quantitative analysis is used to find the relationship among various decision criteria. In this study, ethical and suitability criteria are used along with the financial criteria to rank the assets based on individual investors’ preferences. To demonstrate the efficacy of the problem, a hypothetical data set is used for ethical and suitability criteria, and data set of 10 assets of Nifty 50 companies under the National Stock Exchange (NSE) is collected for financial criteria.