Pairing-based cryptography VS ZK-proofs: what's more efficient for threshold systems?
If you care only about verification, and your protocols are such that the pairing-based approach requires one pairing, while the alternative (so-called "zk-proof") approach requires, say, 2~4 multiplications, one addition, and one hash, then yes, you are right: the pairing-based solution is less efficient. For a rough comparison, see page 14 of my paper: if you pick some of the most common best choices for a pairing-friendly elliptic curve and a pairing-free elliptic curve, then the cost of a pairing will be roughly 8 times the cost of a multiplication (or exponentiation, since we were using multiplicative notations in this paper) in the pairing-free curve. There are two reasons behind that: not only do pairings require more computation than multiplication, it is also the case that the best-known pairing-free curves allow for more efficient operations than the best-known pairing-friendly curves.