Ranking rankings: an axiomatic analysis
摘要
Various occasions require that an individual ranks others in her environment based on how these others rank her; consider a company that seeks an employee who values her back, and a student that works better with a professor who also appreciates her strengths. We introduce a formal framework for the ranking of rankings. A set of objects are weakly ranked by a set of items, and a given object (e.g., the company or the student) must obtain a weak ranking of the items (e.g., all employees or all professors) that depends on their provided rankings of the objects. To conduct an axiomatic analysis of this setting, we propose several normative properties that apply to solutions for the ranking of rankings. Our axioms are inspired by analogous properties in the fields of decision and social choice theory, such as anonymity, monotonicity, and independence. By considering combinations of different axioms, we characterise natural families of solutions, as well as unique solutions therein: lexicographic solutions, and a scoring one.