Procedures for the evaluation of conflicts in rankings of alternatives

A critical problem in decision analysis is how to evaluate the difference between two or more different rankings of a set of alternatives. In this paper it is assumed that a group of decision makers has already established a ranking for each one of a set of alternatives. Then, the problem examined here is how to evaluate the differences among these rankings. This problem does not have a unique solution and thus we consider a number of alternative approaches. The analysis presented here illustrates that this problem is not trivial and, moreover, it is associated with some counter-intuitive issues. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.