A characterization of concordance relations

The notion of concordance is central to many multiple criteria techniques relying on ordinal information, e.g. outranking methods. It leads to compare alternatives by pairs on the basis of a comparison of coalitions of attributes in terms of “importance”. This note proposes a characterization of the binary relations that can be obtained using such comparisons, within a general framework for conjoint measurement that allows for intransitive preferences. We show that such relations are mainly characterized by the very rough differentiation of preference differences that they induce on each attribute.