Setting research priorities: an example from agriculture using the Analytic Hierarchy Process

How should potential research outputs be compared, in order to set priorities, when a diverse range of goals and outputs is possible? This paper introduces a multiple-criteria weighting method, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which can be applied in ex post research evaluation. AHP transforms qualitative subjective judgments into quantitative data (weights). It is a decision analysis technique. The method is illustrated with a simple hypothetical example from a sorghum research program.