Ratings and rankings: voodoo or science?
TLDR
In this article, the authors measure the importance of a given variable within existing composite indicators via Karl Pearson's "correlation ratio"; they call this measure the main effect, and they discuss to what extent the mapping from nominal weights to main effects can be inverted.Abstract:
Summary. Composite indicators aggregate a set of variables by using weights which are understood to reflect the variables’ importance in the index. We propose to measure the importance of a given variable within existing composite indicators via Karl Pearson's ‘correlation ratio’; we call this measure the ‘main effect’. Because socio-economic variables are heteroscedastic and correlated, relative nominal weights are hardly ever found to match relative main effects; we propose to summarize their discrepancy with a divergence measure. We discuss to what extent the mapping from nominal weights to main effects can be inverted. This analysis is applied to six composite indicators, including the human development index and two popular league tables of university performance. It is found that in many cases the declared importance of single indicators and their main effect are very different, and that the data correlation structure often prevents developers from obtaining the stated importance, even when modifying the nominal weights in the set of non-negative numbers with unit sum.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Which factors drive the decision to opt out of individual research rankings? An empirical study of academic resistance to change
Michael Berlemann,Justus Haucap +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present empirical evidence consistent with the hypothesis that those scholars for whom the costs of a change in evaluation methods exceed the expected benefits are more likely to boycott the ranking exercise.
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A generalized maximum entropy estimator to simple linear measurement error model with a composite indicator
TL;DR: The simple linear measurement error model is extended through the inclusion of a composite indicator by using the generalized maximum entropy estimator and a Monte Carlo simulation study is proposed for comparing the performances of the proposed estimator to his counterpart the ordinary least squares “ adjusted for attenuation”.
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‘Academic Freedom and World Class Universities: A virtuous circle?
Terence Karran,Lucy Mallinson +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, a comparative assessment of the relationship between professed levels of de facto protection for academic freedom by teaching and research staff in individual UK universities, and their institution's excellence, as evinced by world university rankings, is presented.
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ARWU ranking uncertainty and sensitivity: What if the award factor was Excluded?
Milan Dobrota,Marina Dobrota +1 more
TL;DR: Uncertainty and analyses are used to examine and compare the stability and confidence of the official ARWU ranking and the Alternative Ranking and indicate that if the ARWu ranking is reduced to the 4‐indicator Alternative Ranking, it shows greater certainty and stability in ranking universities.
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Ethics of quantification or quantification of ethics
TL;DR: Something can be gained by looking at common ethical features of different instances of quantification, and strategies of resistance can be imagined to cope with computational dystopias, metrics fixation and numerical abuse.
References
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Book
Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data
TL;DR: This is the essential companion to Jeffrey Wooldridge's widely-used graduate text Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data (MIT Press, 2001).
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The Analytic Hierarchy Process
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TL;DR: Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) as mentioned in this paper is a systematic procedure for representing the elements of any problem hierarchically, which organizes the basic rationality by breaking down a problem into its smaller constituent parts and then guides decision makers through a series of pairwise comparison judgments to express the relative strength or intensity of impact of the elements in the hierarchy.
Report by the commission on the measurement of economic performance and social progress
TL;DR: As a measure of market capacity and not economic well-being, the authors pointed out that the two can lead to misleading indications about how well-off people are and entail the wrong policy decisions.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a method for setting up Uncertainty and Sensitivity Analyses using Monte Carlo and Linear Regression (MCF) models and a set of experiments.
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The analytic hierarchy process—what it is and how it is used
TL;DR: In this paper, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is introduced as a method of measurement with ratio scales and illustrated with two examples, and the axioms and some of the central theoretical underpinnings of the theory are discussed.