Ranking

A shortlist of relevant insights from the book Ranking: The Unwritten Rules of the Social Game We All Play by Péter  Érdi

• Ranking and hierarchies are crucial in the animal behavior (see the "pecking order" in the chicken society)
• Rankings can always be manipulated and are never completely "objective"
• Mechanisms leading to cyclic dominance do not allow to determine transitive ranks (see the Condorcet Paradox)
• Rankings are unavoidable in natural societies (and probably also in artificial and "hybrid" ones)
• Our "rationally bounded" minds create biased and manipulable rankings
• A "good enough" decision (à la Simon) is a good decision
• No voting/ranking system is perfect (see the Arrow law)>
• Google is an example of a tech company that has based his success on a ranking algorithm
• rank reversal can be a source of manipulation
• Ignorance and Manipulation generate deviations from "true" rankings
• Metrics can be (and often are) "gamed" to manipulate rankings (see Campbell's law)
• Algorithms and Ranking systems even if biased are still better that subjective evaluations
• Future and "Personal Ranking>
• Reputation is important for ranking and evolutionarily social organization (it can be manipulated also)
• Trust and Reputation are important also in modern Recommender Systems (from e-commerce to dating portals)