Prioritisation of alternatives with analytical hierarchy process plus response latency and web surveys

Abstract

This paper introduces a new method that combines the well-known analytical hierarchy process (AHP) with a response latency metric. The response latency is the time taken by respondents to make choices over pairwise comparisons. The analytical calculation of relative importance weights of the alternatives is made by using a response latency model previously validated in several case studies. This combination aims to overcome some drawbacks of the traditional AHP related to the use of a rating scale (the so-called Saaty scale), and it is a natural way to involve response latency in established decisionmaking methods. This new method can be profitably adopted in web surveys where it is easy to measure and record response latencies. An application to a new service development was used to test the proposed method. Findings show that the respondent effort, fatigue, and time consumption are drastically reduced, making the survey much simpler and faster. The obtained results seem to be very reliable in terms of judgement consistency.