Ordinal Priority Method

CORE DEFINITION

The ordinal priority method works with orderings rather than magnitudes. Decision makers rank candidates, or compare them pairwise, and those ordinal judgements are converted into priority weights that can be aggregated across judges or criteria. The core proposition is that people judge relative preference far more reliably than they assign absolute scores, so ordinal input reduces the noise and false precision of rating scales. The key qualification is that ordinals carry no information about distance: a ranked-first option may be barely better than the second, and ordinal scales from different judges are not directly comparable without assumptions.