Heuristic methods of constructing the median in group choice (Q1114568)

A popular and theoretically sound method of reaching a group decision involves construction of the median of a given set of relations. In this paper, we describe a local optimization algorithm for a functional in an arbitrary given class of relations, which generalizes various known algorithms of ranking, classification, and ordered classification. Under natural distributional assumptions on the set of individual expert decisions, we prove consistency of the exact and locally optimal medians.