Outranking relations: Do they have special properties?

Outranking relations are most often built using a concordance-discordance principle. Such relations are in general neither transitive nor complete. This is not to say that the concordance-discordance principle does not impose some ‘structural’ restrictions on these relations. The paper shows why this question may be of some importance for analysing the various techniques designed to build a recommendation on the basis of such relations. These restrictions are studied for the ELECTRE and PROMETHEE methods.