Ranking by pairwise comparisons for Swiss-system tournaments

Pairwise comparison matrices are widely used in multicriteria decision making. This article applies incomplete pairwise comparison matrices in the area of sport tournaments, namely proposing alternative rankings for the 2010 Chess Olympiad Open tournament. It is shown that results are robust regarding scaling technique. In order to compare different rankings, a distance function is introduced with the aim of taking into account the subjective nature of human perception. Analysis of the weight vectors implies that methods based on pairwise comparisons have common roots. Visualization of the results is provided by multidimensional scaling on the basis of the defined distance. The proposed rankings give in some cases intuitively better outcome than currently used lexicographical orders.