Ranking as parameter estimation

Ranking of alternatives is a common, difficult and repeatedly addressed problem, especially when it requires negotiation of experts. The celebrated Arrow's impossibility theorem expresses formally its difficulty. In spite of the progress made by adopting soft ranking, the problem is far from being generically solved. The paper provides a, probably novel, problem formulation by viewing ranking of alternatives as an estimation of an unknown objective ranking vector. The idea is exposed on a specific task of ranking quality of projects by a large group of experts. The task is important on its own but the proposed methodology is the main message worth of generalisation and use in other application domains.