An altermative assessment of importanceThe starting point for this paper is the idca that, for thepurposes of IPA, asking raters to rank attributes in order ofimportancc (with no tics allowed) rather than assigning themabsolute importance values offers the possibility of bettermcasuremcnt of importance. Clcarly, this proccdurc avoids theproblems that besct the indirect mcasures dcscnbed above,and, for cach rater, avoids the problcm of crowding, sinceranking k attributes automatically spreads their rank scorcs"cvcnly betwccn 1 and k.