Three new models for preference voting and aggregation

Preference voting and aggregation require the determination of the weights associated with different ranking places. This paper proposes three new models to assess the weights. Two of them are linear programming (LP) models which determine a common set of weights for all the candidates considered and the other is a nonlinear programming (NLP) model that determines the most favourable weights for each candidate. The proposed models are examined with two numerical examples and it is shown that the proposed models cannot only choose a winner, but also give a full ranking of all the candidates. © 2007 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved.