In this age of big data and high social and professional mobility, ranking has become one of the central issues in social life and information technologies. Ranking algorithms, including the famed Google PageRank [1–3], enable automated selection of relevant information and the functioning of search engines. Ranking is an obligatory task of various selection and evaluation boards. At the same t...

Several real-life complex systems, like human societies or economic networks, are formed by interacting units characterized by patterns of relationships that may generate a group-based social hierarchy. In this paper, we address the problem of how to rank the individuals with respect to their ability to “influence” the relative strength of groups in a society. We also analyse the effect of basi...

Several real-life complex systems, like human societies or economic networks, are formed by interacting units characterized by patterns of relationships that may generate a group-based social hierarchy. In this paper, we address the problem of how to rank the individuals with respect to their ability to “influence” the relative strength of groups in a society. We also analyse the effect of basi...

Most previous research on statistical approaches to social choice focused on the computation and characterization of maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) of various parametric ranking models. In this paper, we take a traditional statistical approach by evaluating social choice mechanisms w.r.t. two important statistical criteria: (1) consistency, a minimum requirement for reasonable estimators, ...

Social bookmarking services have become recently popular in the Web. Along with the rapid increase in the amount of social bookmarks, future applications could leverage this data for enhancing search in the Web. This paper investigates the possibility and potential benefits of a hybrid page ranking approach that would combine the ranking criteria of PageRank with the one based on social bookmar...

This paper proposes a simpler interpretation of Harsanyi’s impartial observer idea. It postulates an impartiality axiom with respect to the distributions of a certain “benchmark good”. The axiom requires society to be indifferent between each distribution of the good and an equiprobable lottery among all distributions that differ from it only in the matching between individuals and allocations ...