A consolidated approach to the axiomatization of outranking relations: a survey and new results

Outranking relations such as produced by the Electre I or II or the Tactic methods are based on a concordance and non-discordance principle that leads to declaring that an alternative is "superior" to another, if the coalition of attributes supporting this proposition is "sufficiently important" (concordance condition) and if there is no attribute that "strongly rejects" it (non-discordance condition). Such a way of comparing alternatives is rather natural and does not require a detailed analysis of tradeoffs between the various attributes. However, it is well known that it may produce binary relations that do not possess any remarkable property of transitivity or completeness. The axiomatic foundations of outranking relations have recently received attention. Within a conjoint measurement framework, characterizations of reflexive concordance–discordance relations have been obtained. These relations encompass those generated by the Electre I and II methods, which are non-strict (reflexive) relations. A different characterization has been provided for strict (asymmetric) preference relations such as produced by Tactic. In this paper we briefly review the various kinds of axiomatizations of outranking relations proposed so far in the literature. Then we analyze the relationships between reflexive and asymmetric outranking relations in a conjoint measurement framework, consolidating our previous work. Co-duality plays an essential rôle in our analysis. It allows us to understand the correspondence between the previous characterizations. Making a step further, we provide a common axiomatic characterization for both types of relations. Applying the co-duality operator to concordance–discordance relations also yields a new and interesting type of preference relation that we call concordance relation with bonus. The axiomatic characterization of such relations results directly from co-duality arguments.