BAYESIAN-ANALYSIS OF CONSISTENT PAIRED COMPARISONS

A general Bayesian model for paired comparisons is formulated and appl ied in some special cases, in which the comparisons are assumed to be consistent. Further, a class of expert models having interesting prope rties connected with the calibration and bias of the expert and the in dependence of irrelevant variables is constructed. The asymptotic beha viour of the two-dimensional model is studied: it is observed that the posterior variance cannot be made arbitrarily small by increasing the number of experts. In addition to exactly stated expert models, the c ase with unknown parameters is also described. The use of models is il lustrated with numerical examples, where the posterior distributions a re generated by a sampling procedure.