Is There a Partial Consensus Ordering Between Rankings?

We propose an innovative approach to the problem recently posed by Hall and Schimek (2012): determining at what point the agreement between two rankings of a long list of items degenerates into noise. We modify the method of estimation in Fligner and Verducci's (1988) multistage model for rankings, from maximum likelihood of conditional agreement over a sample of rankings to a locally smooth estimator of agreement. Through simulations we show that this innovation performs very well under several conditions. Some ramifications are discussed as planned extensions.