Starting rules for incomplete comparisons in the Analytic Hierarchy Process

Entering pairwise comparisons to the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) can be very tedious if the hierarchy is large. Accordingly, techniques exist to derive priorities from incomplete comparisons. This study investigates the effect of different reference items for the first n-1 pairwise comparisons of the Incomplete Analytic Hierarchy Process. It analyzes the accuracy of AHP users in estimating the proportions of five colors in a rectangular picture. The empirical results show that significantly greater initial accuracy is achieved if the items are ranked and the lowest ranked item is used as a common referent for the first n-1 comparisons.