Analytic hierarchy process and data envelopment analysis: A match made in heaven.

•We fuse Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Multi-Attribute Decision-Making (MADM).•We compensate for the weaknesses of DEA with the strengths of MADM and vice versa.•We propose and evaluate several new and promising hybrid MADM-DEA methods.•We develop a new technique to evaluate similarity among multiple rankings in MADM.•This new rank absolute deviation is based on the mean absolute deviation method.