Soft consensus cost models for group decision making and economic interpretations

Huanhuan Zhang, Gang Kou and Yi Peng

European Journal of Operational Research, 2019, vol. 277, issue 3, 964-980

Abstract: In a group decision-making (GDM) process, experts reach a consensus after discussion and persuasion, which requires a moderator to spend time and resource to persuade experts to change their original opinions. Since a unanimous agreement is hard to achieve and costly, a consensus degree or soft consensus was used and various approaches have been proposed to measure the level of consensus in GDM. Though cost is an important factor in GDM, few works have calculated consensus cost occurred during the process. Moreover, the degree of consensus was not considered in the minimum cost consensus study. The objective of this paper is to propose consensus models under a certain degree of consensus, which considers both consensus degree and cost in GDM. To do this, we develop a generalized soft cost consensus model under a certain degree of consensus, which is built by defining a consensus level function and a generalized aggregation operator. A soft minimum cost consensus model is constructed based on arithmetic weighted average operator (AWAO), and the maximum return model is constructed through its dual model. The cost (compensation) is studied from both the perspectives of a moderator and individual experts. The relationships between the two soft consensus cost models are analyzed, and the economic significance of the models are also discussed. Numerical examples are used to explain the proposed models. In addition, to show the usability of the proposed models in real-world context, we apply the proposed models to a loan consensus scenario using data from an online peer-to-peer lending platform.

Keywords: Group decisions and negotiations; Soft consensus; Minimum cost consensus; Aggregation operator; Economic interpretation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (140)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221719302310
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:277:y:2019:i:3:p:964-980

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2019.03.009

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().