A Prescriptive Group Decision Making Method with Imprecise Preference Information

Abstract

This paper presents a prescriptive approach to group decision making with group members' imprecise preference information. This includes an alternative method to Salo's inventive approach for identifying group's preferred alternative when attribute weights, consequences, and possibly group members' importance weights are specified in imprecise ways. The imprecise additive group value function can be decomposed into individual group member's imprecise decision making problems, which are finally aggregated to identify group's preferred alternative. The proposed approach is intuitive and easy to implement, and has merits in a couple of points. First, it is possible to view individual group member's inclinations toward conflicting alternatives and the degree of discrepancies to each other. Second, we can observe how much previous decision results of individual decision maker are influenced during interaction since decisions usually are not made at a single step especially in presence of partial preference information. Finally, the individual group member's decision results can be utilized for further investigation of dominance relations among alternatives in a case that interactive questions and responses fail to give a convergent group consensus.