Well I'm interested in voting theory from the viewpoint of political science and also from the viewpoint of developing ranking systems. It's actually a pretty depressing topic because you can easily come to the conclusion that the public doesn't have an interest at all.

In short, pairwise rankings are real and comparable between people whereas different people might use a scale differently. It's a difficult problem to deal with "i like the bagel shop a little bit more than the rice bowl restaurant but the party member who has celiac's opinion matters more than mine" See

https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Thurstone/Thurstone_1927f.html

now if you have N options you don't have to have everyone evaluate N(N-1) pairs because preferences are correlated and should be transitive. There are many algorithms, like Elo and the methods in that paper that can be used to run tournaments and compute scores. The game Covet uses pairwise ranking and I think gets good scores.

To get back to social decision theory, it's probably not good for players to be in a team for purposes of winning and losing. Like I think sharing clothes with your friends is a really fun mechanic (might make you want to really buy or work for something!) but if people can help or hurt their friends you get into the whole can of worms of coalitions in N-person games.