A method of minimizing rankings inconsistency is proposed for a decision-making problem with rankings of alternatives given by multiple decision makers according to multiple criteria. For each criteria, at first, the total inconsistency between the rankings of all alternatives for the group and the ones for every decision maker is defined after the decision maker weights in respect to the crite...

In the context of doctor shortages and mal-distributions in many Western countries, prestige and lifestyle friendliness have emerged as significant factors for medical students when they choose a medical specialty. In this study, we surveyed two samples of Australian medical students and had them rank 19 medical specialties for prestige (N = 530) and lifestyle friendliness (N = 644). The presti...

We consider the problem of processing similarity queries over a set of top-k rankings where the query ranking and the similarity threshold are provided at query time. Spearman’s Footrule distance is used to compute the similarity between rankings, considering how well rankings agree on the positions (ranks) of ranked items (i.e., the L1 distance). This setup allows the application of metric ind...

Distributions over rankings are used to model data in a multitude of real world settings such as preference analysis and political elections. Modeling such distributions presents several computational challenges, however, due to the factorial size of the set of rankings over an item set. Some of these challenges are quite familiar to the artificial intelligence community, such as how to compact...

Is it possible to compare rankings from different sources when the individual rankings of the top x elements differ? To investigate this question, 2015 sustainable rankings from 4 sources that have ranked the top globally most sustainable corporations are considered (Corporate Knights, Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies, Newsweek’s Green Rankings, and Harris). These rankings are analyzed ...

This paper examines the robustness of efficiency score rankings across four distributional assumptions for trans-log stochastic production-frontier models, using data from 1,221 Japanese water utilities (for 2004 and 2005). One-sided error terms considered include the half-normal, truncated normal, exponential, and gamma distributions. Results are compared for homoscedastic and doubly heterosce...

OBJECTIVE Institutional complication rates are often used to assess hospital quality of care, particularly for conditions and procedures where mortality rates are not useful because deaths are rare. The objective of this study was to assess the correlation among hospital quality assessment rankings based on adjusted mortality, complication and failure-to-rescue rates. DESIGN This study used a...

The World Health Report 2000, prepared by the World Health Organization, presented performance rankings of 191 nations’ health care systems. These rankings have been widely cited in public debates about health care, particularly by those interested in reforming the U.S. health care system to resemble more closely those of other countries. Michael Moore, for instance, famously stated in his film...