THE STRICT RANK ORDINATOR AS MATHEMATICAL TOOL FOR PRESCRIPTIVE DECISION-ANALYSIS

Pure mathematicians have preferred for decades to investigate reflexive order relations because the inclusion of equality permits easy handling [7, p. 105]. For the mathematical applications to social sciences, however, strict order relations are more convenient because the requirement of asymmetry is necessary for the measuring of preferences in prescriptive decision analysis [8, p. 15]. The embeddability of an empirically obtained strict preference relation in a preference rank order, i.e. prescriptive consistence, can be determined by utilization of ordinators within the framework of relator algebra [5].