 Balinski and Laraki show that, among the social grading functions, the so-called ‘order methods’ stand out. For any given profile of individual grade assignments \(\langle G_1, G_2 , \ldots ,G_n\rangle\), an order method (with parameter \(k)\) assigns to each alternative \(x \in X\) the \(k\)th highest grade the alternative has been individually assigned, i.e., the \(k\)th highest grade in the list \(G_1 (x), G_2 (x), \ldots ,G_n (x)\). The most salient example of an order method is the median method, already mentioned above, which assigns to each option the median grade it has been individually assigned. This is the order method with parameter \(k = (n+1)/2\), when \(n\) is odd. (When \(n\) is even, the definition requires some adjustment.) The following result holds: