Skip to main content
Log in

Fair and Fast Convergence on Islands of Agreement in Multicriteria Group Decision Making by Logical Navigation

  • Published:
Group Decision and Negotiation Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Reasoning on multiple criteria is a key issue in group decision to take into account the multidimensional nature of real-world decision-making problems. In order to reduce the induced information overload, in multicriteria decision analysis, criteria are in general aggregated, in many cases by a simple discriminant function of the form of a weighted sum. It requires to, a priori and completely, elicit preferences of decision makers. That can be quite arbitrary. In everyday life, to reduce information overload people often use a heuristic, called “Take-the-best”: they take criteria in a predefined order, the first criterion which discriminates the alternatives at stake is used to make the decision. Although useful, the heuristic can be biased. This article proposes the Logical Multicriteria Sort process to support multicriteria sorting within islands of agreement. It therefore does not require a complete and consistent a priori set of preferences, but rather supports groups to quickly identify the criteria for which an agreement exists. The process can be seen as a generalization of Take-the-best. It also proposes to consider one criterion at a time but once a criterion has been found discriminating it is recorded, the process is iterated and relevant criteria are logically combined. Hence, the biases of Take-the-best are reduced. The process is supported by a GDSS, based on Logical Information Systems, which gives instantaneous feedbacks of each small decision and keeps tracks of all of the decisions taken so far. The process is incremental, each step involves low information load. It guarantees some fairness because all considered alternatives are systematically analyzed along the selected criteria. A successful case study is reported.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5

Similar content being viewed by others

Jeffrey Sanford Russell, John Hawthorne & Lara Buchak

Notes

  1. see http://www.irisa.fr/LIS/ferre/camelis/.

  2. http://ledenez.insa-rennes.fr/abilis/.

  3. http://www.europe-education-formation.fr/bologne-ects-doc.php.

  4. See for example the Arrêté du 1er août 2011 relatif à la licence NOR: ESRS1119411A.

  5. The format, although logical, is hard to read at first. We are investigating how to present this in a more accessible way. Note, however, that participants, although initially puzzled, managed well after they received explanations.

  6. Produced by Conexp http://conexp.sourceforge.net/.

References

  • Ackermann F, Eden C (2010) The role of group decision support systems: negotiating safe energy. In: Kilgour DM, Eden C (eds), (2010, chap 16, pp 285–299)

  • Adla A, Zaraté P, Soubie JL (2011) A proposal of toolkit for gdss facilitators. Group Decis Negot 20:57–77. doi:10.1007/s10726-010-9204-8

    Google Scholar 

  • Alonso S, Cabrerizo FJ, Chiclana F, Herrera F, Herrera-Viedma E (2007) An interactive decision support system based on consistency criteria. J Multiple Valued Log Soft Comput 14:371–385

    Google Scholar 

  • Antunes P, Ho T (2001) The design of a gdss meeting preparation tool. Group Decis Negot 10:5–25. doi:10.1023/A:1008752727069

  • Bana e Costa CA, Chagas MP (2004) A career choice problem: an example of how to use macbeth to build a quantitative value model based on qualitative value judgments. Eur J Oper Res 153(2):323–331

    Google Scholar 

  • Blum G (2007) Islands of agreement: managing enduring armed rivalries. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. URL:http://books.google.fr/books?id=n3aHKSIzuhgC

  • Bordogna G, Fedrizzi M, Pasi G (1997) A linguistic modeling of consensus in group decision making based on owa operators. IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern Part A: Syst Hum 27(1):126–133. doi:10.1109/3468.553232

    Google Scholar 

  • Briggs RO, Kolfschoten GL, de Vreede GJ, Albrecht CC, Lukosch SG (2010) Facilitator in a box: computer assisted collaboration engineering and process support systems for rapid development of collaborative applications for high-value tasks. In: HICSS, IEEE Computer Society, pp 1–10

  • Briggs R, de Vreede GJ (2009) ThinkLets: building blocks for concerted collaboration. Center for Collaboration Science, University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA

  • Davis A, de Vreede GJ, Briggs R (2007) Designing thinklets for convergence. In: AMCIS 2007 proceedings. URL:http://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2007/358

  • den Hengst M, Adkins M (2007) Which collaboration patterns are most challenging: a global survey of facilitators. In: HICSS, IEEE Computer Society, p 17

  • Ducassé M, Ferré S (2008) Fair(er) and (almost) serene committee meetings with logical and formal concept analysis. In: Eklund P, Haemmerlé O (eds) Proceedings of the international conference on conceptual structures, Springer-Verlag, lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 5113

  • Evans JSBT (2008) Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. Annu Rev Psychol Annu Rev Psychol 59:255–278. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093629

    Google Scholar 

  • Evans J, Over D (2010) Heuristic thinking and human intelligence: a commentary on marewski, gaissmaier and gigerenzer. Cogn Process 11:171–175. doi:10.1007/s10339-009-0339-y

    Google Scholar 

  • Ferré S, Ridoux O (2004) An introduction to logical information systems. Inf Process Manag 40(3):383 –419

  • Ferré S, Hermann A (2012) Reconciling faceted search and query languages for the semantic web. Int J Metadata Semant Ontol 7(1):37–54

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ferreira A, Antunes P, Herskovic V (2011) Improving group attention: an experiment with synchronous brainstorming. Group Decis Negot pp 1–24. doi:10.1007/s10726-011-9233-y

  • Ferré S, Ridoux O (2000) A logical generalization of formal concept analysis. In: Mineau G, Ganter B (eds) International conference on conceptual structures, Springer, no. 1867 in, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp 371–384

  • Ganter B, Wille R (1999) Formal concept analysis: mathematical foundations. Springer, Heidelberg

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hermann A, Ferre’ S, Ducasse’ M (2012) An interactive guidance process supporting consistent updates of RDFS graphs. In: ten Teije A et al. (ed) International conference on knowledge engineering and knowledge management (EKAW), LNAI 7603, Springer, pp 185–199

  • Hiltunen V, Kurttila M, Leskinen P, Pasanen K, Pykäläinen J (2009) Mesta: an internet-based decision-support application for participatory strategic-level natural resources planning. For Policy Econ 11:1–9

    Google Scholar 

  • Kaner S (2007) Facilitator’s guide to participatory decision-making, second edition. With Lenny Lind, Catherine Toldi, Sarah Fisk, and Duane Berger, Wiley, London

  • Kerner YH, Schild U, Zeleznikow J (1999) Developing computational models of discretion to build legal knowledge based systems. In: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on artificial intelligence and law, ACM, New York, NY, USA, ICAIL ’99, pp 206–213. doi:10.1145/323706.323799

  • Kilgour DM, Eden C (2010) Handbook of group decision and negotiation, advances in group decision and negotiation, vol 4. Springer Netherlands

  • Kolfschoten GL, de Vreede GJ, Briggs RO (2010) Collaboration engineering. In: Kilgour DM, Eden C (eds), (2010, chap 20, pp 339–357)

  • Kolfschoten G, Appelman J, Briggs R, de Vreede GJ (2004) Recurring patterns of facilitation interventions in gss sessions. In: System sciences, 2004. Proceedings of the 37th annual Hawaii international conference on, p 10. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2004.1265074

  • Kolfschoten G, Veen W (2005) Tool support for gss session design. In: HICSS’05. Proceedings of the 38th annual Hawaii international conference on system sciences, p 16b. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2005.626

  • Lewis LF (2010) Group support systems: overview and guided tour. In: Kilgour DM, Eden C (eds), (2010, chap 14, pp 249–268)

  • Lewis LF, Shakun M (1996) Using a group support system to implement evolutionary systems design. Group Decis Negot 5:319–337. doi:10.1007/BF02404638

    Google Scholar 

  • Marewski JN, Gaissmaier W, Gigerenzer G (2010) Good judgments do not require complex cognition. Cogni Process 11(2):103–121

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mittleman DD, Briggs RO, Murphy JD, Davis AJ (2008) Toward a taxonomy of groupware technologies. In: Briggs RO, Antunes P, de Vreede GJ, Read A (eds) CRIWG, Springer, lecture notes in computer science, vol. 5411, pp 305–317

  • Newell BR, Shanks DR (2003) Take the best or look at the rest? Factors influencing one-reason decision making. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cognit 29(1):53–65. URL:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6X09-47XG0PP-6/2/509792321a0d48d44258f738291b075a

    Google Scholar 

  • Shakun MF (1996) Modeling and supporting task-oriented group processes: purposeful complex adaptive systems and evolutionary systems design. Group Decis Negot 5:305–317. doi:10.1007/BF00553905

  • Shanteau J (1992) How much information does an expert use? is it relevant? Acta Psychol 81(1):75–86. doi:10.1016/0001-6918(92)90012-3

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tilley T (2004) Tool support for fca. In: Second international conference on formal concept analysis, Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2961

  • Vetschera R, Chen Y, Hipel KW, Kilgour DM (2010) Robustness and information levels in case-based multiple criteria sorting. Eur J Oper Res 202(3):841–852. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2009.06.026, URL:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221709004925

  • Vivacqua A, Marques L, Ferreira M, de Souza J (2011) Computational indicators to assist meeting facilitation. Group Decis Negot pp 1–18. doi:10.1007/s10726-011-9235-9

  • Vogel D, Coombes J (2010) The effect of structure on convergence activities using group support systems. In: Kilgour DM, Eden C (eds), (2010, chap 17, pp 301–311)

  • Zeleznikow J (2012) Developing notions of fairness in negotiation support systems. In: de Almeida AT, Morais DC, de França Dantas Daher S (eds) Proceedings of the group decision and negotiation conference, pp 119–128, ISBN 978-85-415-0036-4

  • Zopounidis C, Doumpos M (2002) Multicriteria classification and sorting methods: a literature review. Eur J Oper Res 138(2):229–246, doi:10.1016/S0377-2217(01)00243-0, URL:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221701002430

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

The authors thank their colleagues from the Computer Science Department of the INSA of Rennes who attended the committee case study. They thank Sébastien Ferré for designing, implementing and maintaining Camelis, as well as for numerous inspiring discussions. They thank Alice Hermann for her help on the design of the questionnaires. They thank Floyd Lewis and Gwendolyn Kolfschoten for fruitful discussions.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mireille Ducassé.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Ducassé, M., Cellier, P. Fair and Fast Convergence on Islands of Agreement in Multicriteria Group Decision Making by Logical Navigation. Group Decis Negot 23, 673–694 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10726-013-9372-4

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10726-013-9372-4

Keywords

Navigation