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Decision making is an essential activity for humans and often becomes complex in the presence of uncertainty or insufficient knowledge. This research aims at estimating preferences using pairwise comparisons. A decision maker uses pairwise comparison when he/she is unable to directly assign criteria weights or scores to the available options. The judgments provided in pairwise comparisons may not always be consistent for several reasons. Experimentation has been used to obtain statistical evidence related to the widely-used consistency measures. The results highlight the need to propose new consistency measures. Two new consistency measures - termed congruence and dissonance - are proposed to aid the decision maker in the process of elicitation. Inconsistencies in pairwise comparisons are of two types i.e. cardinal and ordinal. It is shown that both cardinal and ordinal consistency can be improved with the help of these two measures. A heuristic method is then devised to detect and remove intransitive judgments. The results suggest that the devised method is feasible for improving ordinal consistency and is computationally more efficient than the optimization-based methods. There exist situations when revision of judgments is not allowed and prioritization is required without attempting to remove inconsistency. A new prioritization method has been proposed using the graph-theoretic approach. Although the performance of the proposed prioritization method was found to be comparable to other approaches, it has practical limitation in terms of computation time. As a consequence, the problem of prioritization is explored as an optimization problem. A new method based on multi-objective optimization is formulated that offers multiple non-dominated solutions and outperforms all other relevant methods for inconsistent set of judgments. A priority estimation tool (PriEsT) has been developed that implements the proposed consistency measures and prioritization methods. In order to show the benefits of PriEsT, a case study involving Telecom infrastructure selection is presented.