Determining Criteria Weights as a Function of Their Ranks in Multiple - Criteria Decision Making

The problem of assigning weights from ordinal ranks appears in many contexts in multi-criteria decision making. In this paper, we present an empirical methodology for converting an ordinal ranking of a number of criteria into numerical weights. Based on this methodology, the weight for each criterion is expressed as a simple mathematical function of its rank and the total number of criteria. The proposed methodology is empirically developed, evaluated, and validated based on a set of experiments involving university students and faculty members. The proposed method is compared with well-known methods in the literature and has shown superiority in assigning criteria weights from ordinal ranks.