ECHELONS IN INCOMPLETE RELATIONS

An efficient method of value assessment of a set of exchangeable alter natives A = {a(1), a(2),..., a(n)} is presented. It particularly appli es to situations where certain preferences may be easily evaluated or are already known, while other binary comparisons may not at once be a vailable. Further applications are to ranking partial tournaments and the emergence and the characterisation of organisational hierarchy. By sequentially performing transitively efficient assessments of uncompa red pairs, an initial weakly acyclical preference structure in A is tr ansformed into an ordering of A in echelons. We call these nicely surv eyable preference structures echelon orders. Theoretical properties of echelon orders are investigated, including a characterisation and a n umerical representation.