A cumulative prospect theory-based method for group medical emergency decision-making with interval uncertainty

Abstract

Background An emergency response to a medical situation is generally considered to be a risk decision-making problem. When an emergency event occurs, it makes sense to take into account more than one decision maker’s opinions and psychological behaviors. The existing research tends to ignore these multidimensional aspects. To fill this literature gap, we propose a multi-attribute model. Methods The model is based on cumulative prospect theory (CPT), considering multiple experts’ psychological factors. By not assuming full rationality, we extend existing models to allow multiple experts’ risk preferences to be incorporated into the decision-making process in the case of an emergency. Then, traditional CPT is extended by allowing for multiple attributes. In addition, rather than using crisp data, interval values are adopted to tackle the usual uncertainties in reality. Results The multi-attribute CPT based model proposed can deal with the selection of potential emergency alternatives. The model incorporates interval values to allow more uncertainty and the comparative studies show that the optimal solution changes under different scenarios. Conclusions Our illustrative example and comparative study show that considering multiple experts and multiple attributes is more reasonable, especially in complicated situations under an emergency. In addition, decision-makers’ risk preferences highly affect the selection outcomes, highlighting their importance in the medical decision-making process. Our proposed model can be applied to similar fields with appropriate modifications.