In group living animals, individuals may visit other groups. The costs and benefits of such visits for the members of a group will depend on the attributes and intentions of the visitor, and the social status of responding group members. Using wild groups of the cooperatively breeding cichlid fish (Neolamprologus pulcher), we compared group member responses to unfamiliar ‘visiting’ conspecifics...

Abstract The intensification of the competitive environment between financial and credit institutions and the provision of new financial services in order to retain and attract customers, has made the use of more efficient electronic banking tools an inevitable necessity. Therefore, the present study intends to rank banks in terms of the efficiency of electronic services. In order to achi...

Ranking of alternatives is a common, difficult and repeatedly addressed problem, especially when it requires negotiation of experts. The celebrated Arrow’s impossibility theorem expresses formally its difficulty. In spite of theprogressmadebyadopting soft ranking, the problem is far from being generically solved. The paper provides a, probably novel, problem formulation by viewing ranking of al...

Reputation is a valuable asset in online social lives and it has drawn increased attention. How to evaluate user reputation in online rating systems is especially significant due to the existence of spamming attacks. To address this issue, so far, a variety of methods have been proposed, including network-based methods, quality-based methods and group-based ranking method. In this paper, we pro...

BACKGROUND Attribute selection represents an important step in the development of discrete-choice experiments (DCEs), but is often poorly reported. In some situations, the number of attributes identified may exceed what one may find possible to pilot in a DCE. Hence, there is a need to gain insight into methods to select attributes in order to construct the final list of attributes. This study ...

Unethical behavior within organizations is not rare. We investigate experimentally the role of status-seeking behavior in sabotage and cheating activities aiming at improving one’s performance ranking in a flat-wage environment. We find that average effort is higher when individuals are informed about their relative performance. However, ranking feedback also favors disreputable behavior. Some ...

The group ranking approach has been applied in many applications, such as in decision-making support systems, group recommendation systems, and so on. Previous studies have focused on how to generate a total ranking list. When there is no consensus or only slight consensus in the users’ opinions or preferences, this kind of result may damage the decision-maker’s decision. For this reason, this ...

Conventional data envelopment analysis (DEA) assists decision makers in distinguishing between efficient and inefficient decision making units (DMUs) in a homogeneous group. However, DEA does not provide more information about the efficient DMUs. One of the interesting research subjects is to discriminate between efficient DMUs. The aim of this paper is ranking all efficient (extreme and non-ex...

The purpose of this article is to introduce a new scheme for robust multivariate ranking by making use of a not so familiar notion called monotonicity. Under this scheme, as in the case of classical outward ranking, we get an increasing sequence of regions diverging away from a central region (may be a single point) as nucleus. The nuclear region may be deened as the median region.