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

This paper introduces a new method that combines the well-known analytical hierarchyprocess (AHP) with a response latency metric. The response latency is the time takenby respondents to make choices over pairwise comparisons. The analytical calculationof relative importance weights of the alternatives is made by using a response latencymodel previously validated in several case studies. This combination aims to overcomesome drawbacks of the traditional AHP related to the use of a rating scale (the so-calledSaaty scale), and it is a natural way to involve response latency in established decisionmakingmethods. This new method can be profitably adopted in web surveys where it iseasy to measure and record response latencies. An application to a new servicedevelopment was used to test the proposed method. Findings show that therespondent effort, fatigue, and time consumption are drastically reduced, making thesurvey much simpler and faster. The obtained results seem to be very reliable interms of judgement consistency.