Determining Aggregate Criteria Weights From Criteria Rankings By A Group Of Decision Makers

In this paper, we present an empirical methodology to determine aggregate numerical criteria weights from group ordinal ranks of multiple decision criteria. Assuming that such ordinal ranks are obtained from several decision makers, aggregation procedures are proposed to combine individual rank inputs into group criteria weights. In this process, we use previous empirical results for an individual decision maker, in which a simple function provides the weight for each criterion as a function of its rank and the total number of criteria. Using a set of experiments, weight aggregation procedures are proposed and empirically compared for two cases: (i) when all the decision makers rank the same set of criteria, and (ii) when they rank different subsets of criteria. The proposed methodology can be used to determine relative weights for any set of criteria, given only criteria ranks provided by several decision makers.