Metrizable ordinal proximity measures and their aggregation

Ordered qualitative scales formed by linguistic terms are frequently used for evaluating sets of alternatives in different decision-making problems. These scales are usually implicitly considered as uniform in the sense that the psychological proximity between consecutive terms is perceived as identical. However, sometimes agents can perceive different proximities between the linguistic terms of the scale, and an appropriate method is required for aggregating these perceptions. In this paper we introduce the notion of metrizable ordinal proximity measure, discuss some aggregation procedures and propose a method based on metrics for aggregating experts' opinions on proximities between linguistic terms on ordered qualitative scales. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.