Why should not a decision analyst be content with only (n-1) pairwise comparisons? Echoes from the literature

More and more often, scholars in the field of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) seem to be overly adverse towards inconsistency. While this has some reasonable justifications, hiding the dirt under the rug, by not even trying to let possible inconsistencies emerge, can have negative effects on the decision process. In other words, there may be some merit in having a decision maker being consistent when he is given the possibility of being inconsistent, but there isn’t any in having a fully consistent decision maker when he cannot be inconsistent. In the latter case, consistency of preferences cannot, by all means, be associated to the reliability of judgements. These concepts are illustrated by taking into account some recently introduced methods whose common inspiration is the Best-Worst Method.