  We propose a development of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) permitting
to use the methodology also in cases of decision problems with a very large
number of alternatives evaluated with respect to several criteria. While the
application of the original AHP method involves many pairwise comparisons
between alternatives and criteria, our proposal is composed of three steps: (i)
direct evaluation of the alternatives at hand on the considered criteria, (ii)
selection of some reference evaluations; (iii) application of the original AHP
method to reference evaluations; (iv) revision of the direct evaluation on the
basis of the prioritization supplied by AHP on reference evaluations. The new
proposal has been tested and validated in an experiment conducted on a sample
of university students. The new methodology has been therefore applied to a
real world problem involving the evaluation of 21 Social Housing initiatives
sited in the Piedmont region (Italy). To take into account interaction between
criteria, the Choquet integral preference model has been considered within a
Non Additive Robust Ordinal Regression approach.
