The paper reviews some axioms of additivity concerning ranking methods used
for generalized tournaments with possible missing values and multiple
comparisons. It is shown that one of the most natural properties, called
consistency, has strong links to independence of irrelevant comparisons, an
axiom judged unfavourable when players have different opponents. Therefore some
directions of weakening consistency are suggested, and several ranking methods,
the score, generalized row sum and least squares as well as fair bets and its
two variants (one of them entirely new) are analysed whether they satisfy the
properties discussed. It turns out that least squares and generalized row sum
with an appropriate parameter choice preserve the relative ranking of two
objects if the ranking problems added have the same comparison structure.Comment: 24 pages, 9 figure