Prioritization of Alternatives with AHP Plus Response Latency and Web Surveys

Purpose: Overcome some drawbacks of the widely applied Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) related to the use of a rating scale for respondent’s judgments and propose a new method to prioritize alternatives based on web surveys. Methodology/Approach: We use the response latency, i.e. the time taken to make a decision, to replace the rating scale in the pairwise comparisons which is a fundamental part of the AHP procedure. A method combining the AHP with a mathematical model for the response latency is proposed in the paper. Findings: Eliminating the rating scale and leaving only the “take the best” task alleviates the respondent and makes the survey much faster and intuitive. Moreover the results look more reliable in terms of consistency of judgments. Research Limitation/implication: An application to the development of a new service is used to test the proposed method. Good results of the method are achieved also thanks to the use of web survey platforms, today easily accessible to both researchers and respondents; strengths and weaknesses of web surveys are taken into consideration. Originality/Value of paper: The integration of the response latency in the traditional procedure of AHP gives two interesting contributions: on one hand it can be seen as a way to overcome, or at least alleviate, some limitations of the AHP; on the other hand it is a natural way to involve the response latency, which is a measure quite well known in many scientific fields but seldom modeled and very rarely utilized in managerial decisions. Nowadays with the use of web surveys that measure can be much more easily manageable.