Preliminary Draft – September 13 , 2007 PageRank as a Weak Tournament Solution ?

We observe that ranking systems—a theoretical framework for web page ranking and collaborative filtering introduced by Altman and Tennenholtz—and tournament solutions—a well-studied area of social choice theory—are strongly related. This relationship permits a mutual transfer of axioms and solution concepts. As a first step, we formally analyze a tournament solution that is based on Google’s PageRank algorithm and study its interrelationships with common tournament solutions. It turns out that the PageRank set is always contained in both the Schwartz set and the uncovered set, but may be disjoint from most other tournament solutions. While PageRank does not satisfy various standard properties from the tournament literature, it can be much more discriminatory than established tournament solutions.