Abstract Pairwise comparisons have been a long-standing technique for comparing alternatives/criteria and their role has pivotal in the development of modern decision-making methods. The evaluation is very often done linguistically. Several scales proposed to translate linguistic into quantitative evaluation. In this paper, we perform an experiment investigate, under our methodological choices,...

This study examines the notion of generators of a pairwise comparisons matrix. Such approach decreases the number of pairwise comparisons from n · (n − 1) to n − 1. An algorithm of reconstructing of the PC matrix from its set of generators is presented.

We consider the problem of ranking n players from partial pairwise comparison data under Bradley–Terry–Luce model. For first time in literature, minimax rate this is derived with respect to Kendall’s tau distance that measures difference between two rank vectors by counting number inversions. The exhibits a transition an exponential and polynomial depending on magnitude signal-to-noise ratio pr...