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Linguistic group decision-making: opinion aggregation and measures of consensus

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Abstract

Group decision-making is a crucial activity, necessary in many aspects of our civilization. In many cases, due to inherent complexity, experts cannot express their opinion or preferences using exact numbers, thus resorting to a qualitative preference such as linguistic labels. Another complicating factor is the fact that very seldom all individuals in a group share the same opinion about the alternatives. This creates the need to aggregate all the differing individual opinions into a group opinion. Moreover, it is desirable to be able to assess the level of agreement among the experts; termed consensus. This paper presents a methodology for aggregating experts’ judgements, presented as linguistic labels, into a group opinion with a measure of the group consensus. The aggregation model allows weighted experts to express a degree of optimism or upward bias in their opinions. Then the paper presents two models of calculating the consensus based on the individual expert opinions and the group aggregated opinion.

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  1. Dept. of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Eng., Kansas State University, 216 Durland Hall, Manhattan, KS, 66503, USA

    D. Ben-Arieh & Z. Chen

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  1. D. Ben-Arieh
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  2. Z. Chen
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Correspondence to D. Ben-Arieh.

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Ben-Arieh, D., Chen, Z. Linguistic group decision-making: opinion aggregation and measures of consensus. Fuzzy Optim Decis Making 5, 371–386 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10700-006-0017-9

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