Paired Comparison Method

The paired comparison method is a systematic elicitation technique in which informants are shown every possible pair of items from a set and asked, for each pair, which member better fits a single criterion — which is sweeter, more dangerous, more prestigious, or more similar to a reference. Because every item is judged against every other item, the procedure forces fine, transitive discriminations that a one-shot ranking would blur. Aggregating the pairwise verdicts across informants yields a dominance or proximity matrix from which a stable rank order or an interval scale can be recovered.