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Modelling experts’ attitudes in group decision making

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Abstract

Nowadays, important decisions that have a significant impact either in societies or in organizations are commonly made by a group rather than a single decision maker, which might require more than a majority rule to obtain a real acceptance. Consensus-reaching processes provide a way to drive group decisions which are more accepted and appreciated by people affected by such a decision. These processes care about different consensus measures to determine the agreement in the group. The correct choice of a consensus measure that reflects the attitude of decision makers is a key issue for improving and optimizing consensus-reaching processes, which still requires further research. This paper studies the concept of group’s attitude towards consensus, and presents a consensus model that integrates it in the measurement of consensus, through an extension of OWA aggregation operators, the so-called Attitude-OWA. The approach is applied to the solution of a real-like group decision making problem with the definition of different attitudes, and the results are analysed.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partially supported by the Research Project TIN-2009-08286, P08-TIC-3548 and FEDER funds.

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Correspondence to I. Palomares.

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Palomares, I., Liu, J., Xu, Y. et al. Modelling experts’ attitudes in group decision making. Soft Comput 16, 1755–1766 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-012-0859-8

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