Establishing a leader in a pairwise comparisons method

Abstract Like electoral systems, decision-making methods are also vulnerable to manipulation by decision-makers. The ability to effectively defend against such threats can only come from thoroughly understanding the manipulation mechanisms. In the presented article, we show two algorithms that can be used to launch a manipulation attack. They allow for equating the weights of two selected alternatives in the pairwise comparison method and, consequently, choosing a leader. The theoretical considerations are accompanied by a Monte Carlo simulation showing the relationship between the size of the PC matrix, the degree of inconsistency, and the ease of manipulation. This work is a continuation of our previous research published in the paper (Szybowski et al., 2023)