Implicit Elicitation of Attitudinal Character in the OWA Operator

Abstract

Ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operators are well recognized as aggregation operators and are successfully applied to real world problems. The OWA operator weights are also known to play an important role in the aggregation, and thus, they heavily affect the final aggregation results. In this paper, we attempt to elicit a hidden attitudinal character from a decision-maker through a simple question about his or her preference of alternatives for the purpose of alleviating the burden of specifying an attitudinal character. A paired comparison of alternatives in a decision-making problem yields a precise (or uncertain) attitudinal character, which can be used to derive OWA operator weights via one of the well-established weight generating methods. (C) 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.