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An Improved Consensus-Based Model for Large Group Decision Making Problems Considering Experts with Linguistic Weighted Information

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Abstract

In this paper, a consensus-based model in a large group decision making environment is proposed to achieve the group consensus among experts. This framework considers experts with different importance levels, which are expressed by the forms of linguistic variables. More specifically, the group of large-scale experts is firstly transferred into some small groups to simplify the decision making process. Following this, cluster weights can be determined by combining the group size of a cluster and the importance degrees of experts in a cluster. In the consensus process, an objective adjustment coefficient based on the expert’s importance degree is developed to modify the individual preferences, which can retain the original decision information of expert with higher importance degree as much as possible. The main characteristic of the proposed objective adjustment coefficient is that generates different coefficients for different clusters based on experts’ importance degrees. Finally, the proposed model is applied to an application example, and some detailed analysis and comparisons are given to verify the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Acknowledgements

The authors first would like to thank the Editor-in-Chief, the Associate Editor and the anonymous referees for their constructive comments that have helped us to improve the paper. This work was supported by the project for Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71671189) and the key projects for Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 71790615, 71431006).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, 510006, China

    Pei Wang

  2. School of Business, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, China

    Pei Wang & Xuanhua Xu

  3. School of Management, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510520, China

    Shuai Huang

Authors
  1. Pei Wang
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  2. Xuanhua Xu
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  3. Shuai Huang
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Correspondence to Xuanhua Xu.

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Wang, P., Xu, X. & Huang, S. An Improved Consensus-Based Model for Large Group Decision Making Problems Considering Experts with Linguistic Weighted Information. Group Decis Negot 28, 619–640 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10726-019-09615-8

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