Extending the applicability of the analytic hierarchy process

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has often been used to support decisions that only have to be made once. in this study, we explore whether the AHP can be applied to repetitive decision-making. We suggest a variant of the process to elicit implicit decision models that evaluate alternatives not incorporated in the models construction. In this variant, absolute, rather than relative, intensities (for example, low and medium) of the criteria are used. The results of a laboratory study with 180 participants show that the AHP clearly outperforms the naive model. This provides the potential for a new range of AHP applications, including repetitive decisions, decisions with a large number of alternatives, and eliciting parameters in expert systems. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.