Ranking Regret

Dr. Zhuzhu Zhou is graduated from Boston College. Her research fields include social choice, behavioral economics, public economics, and econometrics. She will join Xiamen University as an assistant professor in economics in Fall 2021.

A social planner wants to rank people, e.g., assign airline passengers a boarding order. A natural ranking is to order people from most to least sensitive to their rank. But people's feelings can depend both on their assigned rank, and on the alternatives they might have been assigned. As a result, there may be no best ranking, due to intransitive cycles. This paper shows how to tell when a best ranking exists, and that when it exists, it is indeed the natural ranking. When this best does not exist, an alternative second-best group ranking strategy is proposed, which resembles actual airline boarding policies.