A Composite Indicator Methodology to Rank National Olympic Committees

Abstract

This paper proposes a composite indicator methodology to rank National Olympic Committees (NOCs) by considering only the medals won at both Summer and Winter Olympic games. The lexicographic and sum ranking systems at both Summer and Winter Olympics are comprehensively investigated to create the preliminary decision matrix for constructing composite indicators. Then we investigate the preferential difference and preferential priority for better reflecting the preference structures of the sub-indicators, and thereby obtain a revised decision matrix. The SMAA-2 is employed to implement the composite indicator construction based upon the revised decision matrix. An empirical study is performed to demonstrate the applicability of our methodology, using the data set that is composed of 28 NOCs who have participated in both the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games and the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics. The Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient and the satisfaction index are calculated to justify the merits of the proposed methodology.