An ordinal sorting method for group decision-making

Abstract Several group decision-making methods were proposed with the aim to establish, from individual opinions, a collective one. However, the literature review of such methods show that, until now, few of them accept individual preferences expressed in partial pre-orders or, more generally, in preferences relational systems (p.r.s.). In addition, the majority of these methods produce a ranking on the alternative set, i.e. they concern the ranking decision-making problematic. In fact, the efforts provided to develop methods which treat, for example, the sorting problematic, remain insufficient. For these reasons, we propose in this paper an ordinal sorting method which determines, from individual p.r.s., at least one collective assignment which takes into account the relative importance of the members. If there is more than one collective assignment, an interactive procedure to reach a consensus assignment is proposed.