Rank Ordering Criteria Weighting Methods – a Comparative Overview

Multicriteria decision making (MCDM) refers to screening, prioritizing, ranking or selecting the alternatives based on human judgment from among a finite set of ` alternatives in terms of the multiple usually conflicting criteria. A very significant role in MCDM models plays the weights of criteria which usually provide the information about the relative importance of the considered criteria. Several different methods are developed to take criteria priorities into account. The aim of the paper is a comparative overview on several rank ordering weights methods which are considered to convert the ordinal ranking of a number of criteria into numerical weights. Using ranks to elicit weights by some formulas is more reliable than just directly assigning weights to criteria because usually decision makers are more confident about the ranks of some criteria than their weights, and they can agree on ranks more easily. The great advantage of those methods is the fact that they rely only on ordinal information about attribute importance. They can be used for instance in situations of time pressure, quality nature of criteria, lack of knowledge, imprecise, incomplete information or partial information, decision maker’s limited attention and information processing capability. The equal weights, rank sum, rank exponent, rank reciprocal as well centroid weights technique are presented. These methods have been selected for their simplicity and effectiveness.