Choosing Aggregation Rules for Composite Indicators

From a formal point of view, a composite indicator is an aggregate of all dimensions, objectives, individual indicators and
variables used for its construction. This implies that what defines a composite indicator is the set of properties underlying
its mathematical aggregation convention. In this article, I try to revise the theoretical debate on aggregation rules by looking
at contributions from both voting theory and multi-criteria decision analysis. This cross-fertilization helps in clarifying
many ambiguous issues still present in the literature and allows discussing the key assumptions that may change the evaluation
of an aggregation rule easily, when a composite indicator has to be constructed.