Abstract
Benefit of the doubt (BoD) models are widely used for multicriteria analysis. A BoD model allows the weights of bcriteria to vary across observations based on the observed data; however, this can reduce the discriminatory power and induce rank reversal. The common weight BoD was developed to mitigate these issues at the expense of the “benefit of the doubt” itself because a degree of weight flexibility is lost. This paper proposes the graph subset dominance BoD (GSD-BoD) method to reduce the number of observations within groups of decisionmaking units with similar performance and allow BoD weights to be unrestricted within those groups. As a result, the proposed GSD-BoD method overcomes the major limitations of the conventional BoD method and its extensions without increasing the occurrence of the rank reversal. The proposed method is tested through illustrative examples and simulations.
Zhang, Ch.; Chen, S.; Su, W.; Baležentis, T; Benjamin, L. 2026. Addressing rank reversal in subgroup dominance benefit of the doubt model: A case study of the human development index. European journal of operational research : Elsevier. ISSN 0377-2217. eISSN 1872-6860. p. 1–13. DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2026.02.006. [Scopus; Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science)]