A Data Envelopment Model for Aggregating Preference Rankings

This paper presents a general model for aggregating votes from a preferential ballot. The thrust of the model is to accord each candidate a fair assessment in terms of his overall standing vis-a-vis first place, second place, ..., k th place votes. The form of the model is a combined index j = 1 k W j v ij where v ij is the number of the j th place votes received by the i th candidate. The weights W j are assumed to form a monotonically decreasing sequence with W j – W j + 1 d ( j , ). These constraints correspond to the assurance region (AR) side constraints in the DEA framework. The properties of the model are examined in terms of this discrimination intensity function d , and in the special case that d ( j , ) = , our model is shown to be equivalent to the consensus models of Borda and Kendall.