A Bradley-Terry Model-Based Approach to Prioritize the Balance Scorecard Driving Factors: The Case Study of a Financial Software Factory

The prioritization of factors has been widely studied applying different methods from the domain of the multiple-criteria decision-making, such as for example the Analytic Hierarchy Process method (AHP) based on decision-makers’ pairwise comparisons. Most of these methods are subjected to a complex analysis. The Bradley-Terry model is a probability model for paired evaluations. Although this model is usually known for its application to calculating probabilities, it can be also extended for ranking factors based on pairwise comparison. This application is much less used; however, this work shows that it can provide advantages, such as greater simplicity than traditional multiple-criteria decision methods in some contexts. This work presents a method for ranking the perspectives and indicators of a balance scorecard when the opinion of several decision-makers needs to be combined. The data come from an elicitation process, accounting for the number of times a factor is preferred to others by the decision-makers in a pairwise comparisons. No preference scale is used; the process just indicates the winner of the comparison. Then, the priority weights are derived from the Bradley-Terry model. The method is applied in a Financial Software Factory for demonstration and validation. The results are compared against the application of the AHP method for the same data, concluding that despite the simplifications made with the new approach, the results are very similar. The study contributes to the multiple-criteria decision-making domain by building an integrated framework, which can be used as a tool for scorecard prioritization.