[R] Incomplete rank functions

[Jim Lemon]

Hi folks,
Thanks to my esteemed colleagues, I have been grappling with the 
analysis of incomplete ranks. These result from questions like:

Number the three most important things from the following list in order 
from 1 to 3.

OR

Where some or all respondents or observers have not assigned ranks to 
some items.

In doing so, I have programmed a few functions to impute values where 
all ranks have not been allocated. These are all based upon substituting 
the mean of all unallocated ranks for missing values for each set (row) 
of ranks. Ties can be handled and optionally expanded to cover the 
values that would have resulted if the ties had not occurred. This 
satisfies the assumption that all sets of ranks sum to the same value, 
and infers that the unranked items were not distinguished by the ranker.

I searched Jon Baron's index with "incomplete ranks" and found nothing 
like this. If there is a package maintainer out there who is interested 
in using these functions, I would be happy to donate them.

Jim