My part is bigger than yours -- assessment within a group of peers using the pairwise comparisons method

Abstract

A project (e.g. writing a collaborative research paper) is often a group effort. At the end, each contributor identifies his or her contribution, often verbally. The reward, however, is quite often financial in nature. This leads to the question of what (percentage) share in the creation of the paper is due to individual authors. Different authors may have various opinions on the matter, and, even worse, their opinions may have different relevance. In this paper, we present a simple models that allows aggregation of experts' opinions linking the priority of his preference directly to the assessment made by other experts. In this approach, the greater the contribution of a given expert, the greater the importance of his opinion. The presented method can be considered as an attempt to find consensus among a group of peers involved in the same project. Hence, its applications may go beyond the proposed study example of writing a scientific paper.