Aggregating Elo Ratings: An Axiomatization

TL;DR

This paper presents an axiomatic framework for aggregating multiple Elo ratings into a single scalar rating, ensuring consistency and interpretability across different rating environments.

Contribution

It introduces a unique rating aggregation rule based on axioms, unifying various Elo ratings into a single, coherent scale.

Findings

The proposed rule converts ratings to Elo strengths, averages them, and converts back.

The axioms are shown to be independent and logically consistent.

Application to classical, rapid, and blitz ratings demonstrates the method's practicality.

Abstract

Many environments assign several Elo ratings to the same agent: a chess player has classical, rapid, and blitz ratings; an online platform may rate by time control, mode, or format; an evaluator may rate performance across tasks or roles. This paper axiomatizes when such a vector of ratings can be reduced to a single scalar rating that is itself on the Elo scale. We impose three substantive conditions: same-scale normalization (a uniform profile keeps its rating), recursive consistency (aggregating in blocks gives the same answer as aggregating directly, provided each block carries the total weight of its members), and marginal Elo-strength consistency (for two equally weighted coordinates, the ratio of marginal contributions to the combined rating equals the ordinary Elo odds). The unique rating rule satisfying these conditions converts each component to its Elo strength, takes a weighted arithmetic mean of strengths, and converts back. We show how this rule differs from a random-format lottery and from rating-scale averaging, prove the axioms are independent, and illustrate the rule on combining classical, rapid, and blitz ratings.