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Related papers: An impossibility theorem for paired comparisons

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We study the conditions under which the iterated elimination of strictly dominated strategies is order independent and we identify a class of discontinuous games for which order does not matter. In this way, we answer the open problem…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-03-29 Monica Patriche

Recently there has been much interest and progress in extending the definition of contextuality to systems with disturbance. We prove that such an endeavor cannot simultaneously satisfy the following principles: (1) any deterministic system…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-11-13 Alisson Tezzin , Elie Wolfe , Barbara Amaral , Matt Jones

We study the problem of aggregating individual preferences over alternatives into a collective ranking. A distinctive feature of our setting is that agents are matched to alternatives. Applications include rankings of colleges or academic…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-11 Gaurab Aryal , Thayer Morrill , Peter Troyan

Ranking systems produce ordered lists from scalar scores, yet the ranking itself depends only on pairwise comparisons. We develop a mathematical theory that takes this observation seriously, centering the analysis on pairwise margins rather…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Yin Cheng

We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-04-02 E. Ben-Naim , N. W. Hengartner , S. Redner , F. Vazquez

We propose a test of fairness in score-based ranking systems called matched pair calibration. Our approach constructs a set of matched item pairs with minimal confounding differences between subgroups before computing an appropriate measure…

Preference aggregation is a fundamental problem in voting theory, in which public input rankings of a set of alternatives (called preferences) must be aggregated into a single preference that satisfies certain soundness properties. The…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Kenan Wood , Hammurabi Mendes , Jonad Pulaj

Possibility theory offers a framework where both Lehmann's "preferential inference" and the more productive (but less cautious) "rational closure inference" can be represented. However, there are situations where the second inference does…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-18 Salem Benferhat , Didier Dubois , Henri Prade

In this paper, we consider the consistency of the desirability relation with the ranking of the players in a simple game provided by some well-known solutions, in particular the Public Good Index [14] and the criticality-based ranking [1].…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Michele Aleandri , Vito Fragnelli , Stefano Moretti

This study proposes a new efficiency requirement, a minimal almost weak Pareto principle, which says that x is socially better than y whenever the only one individual never prefers y to x, and all the others prefers x to y. Then, I show…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-01-20 Norihito Sakamoto

In this paper, we consider large-scale ranking problems where one is given a set of (possibly non-redundant) pairwise comparisons and the underlying ranking explained by those comparisons is desired. We show that stochastic gradient descent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-04 Benjamin Jarman , Lara Kassab , Deanna Needell , Alexander Sietsema

In the unidimensional unfolding model, given m objects in general position there arise 1+m(m-1)/2 rankings. The set of rankings is called the ranking pattern of the m given objects. By changing these m objects, we can generate various…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2007-07-11 H. Kamiya , P. Orlik , A. Takemura , H. Terao

Real-world applications of machine learning tools in high-stakes domains are often regulated to be fair, in the sense that the predicted target should satisfy some quantitative notion of parity with respect to a protected attribute.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-07 Han Zhao , Geoffrey J. Gordon

Pairwise comparisons are an important tool of modern (multiple criteria) decision making. Since human judgments are often inconsistent, many studies focused on the ways how to express and measure this inconsistency, and several…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-05-01 Jiri Mazurek

In many multiagent environments, a designer has some, but limited control over the game being played. In this paper, we formalize this by considering incompletely specified games, in which some entries of the payoff matrices can be chosen…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-04-30 Markus Brill , Rupert Freeman , Vincent Conitzer

Estimating the dependences between random variables, and ranking them accordingly, is a prevalent problem in machine learning. Pursuing frequentist and information-theoretic approaches, we first show that the p-value and the mutual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-02 Harald Steck

Uncertainty may be taken to characterize inferences, their conclusions, their premises or all three. Under some treatments of uncertainty, the inferences itself is never characterized by uncertainty. We explore both the significance of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-18 Henry E. Kyburg

Rankings derived from pairwise comparisons are central to many economic and computational systems. In the context of large language models (LLMs), rankings are typically constructed from human preference data and presented as leaderboards…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Angel Rodrigo Avelar Menendez , Yufeng Liu , Xiaowu Dai

A tournament is an oriented complete graph. The problem of ranking tournaments was firstly investigated by P. Erd\H{o}s and J. W. Moon. By probabilistic methods, the existence of "unrankable" tournaments was proved. On the other hand, they…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-02-28 Shohei Satake

In this paper I present an argument and a general schema which can be used to construct a problem case for any decision theory, in a way that could be taken to show that one cannot formulate a decision theory that is never outperformed by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Joar Skalse