Consensus reaching in committees

Abstract

In this paper, we apply a consensus model to decision-making in committees that have to choose one or more alternatives from a set of alternatives. The model does not use a voting rule nor a set of winning coalitions. Every decision maker evaluates each alternative with respect to given criteria. The criteria may be of unequal importance to a decision maker. Decision makers may be advised by a chairman to adjust their preferences, i.e., to change their evaluation of some alternative(s) or/and the importance of the criteria, in order to obtain a better consensus. The consensus result should satisfy constraints concerning the consensus degree and the majority degree. A simple example is presented.

Reaching consensus in multiagent decision making

“…Then the chairman decides that there are not possible move if the players are not willing for any admissible move. A very particular case is the one considered in the papers Carlsson et al, 1992, andEklund et al, 2007, that we call the Bastian procedure. An alternative to the Bastian procedure is to decide that the maximal winning coalition to enlarge is the one with the maximum number of players.…”

“…This is related with any description or definition of the behavior of the components in a group whose aim is to reach consensus. Let us illustrate some reasonable issues that the concept of consensus should meet (see, e. g., Carlsson et al,1992, Eklund et al, 2007. Seeking consensus, especially if utility issues are involved, is the result of a trade-off between agreement and compromise in the behavior of a single decision maker.…”

“…Now we describe a model of collective decision making and the related consensus achievement procedure (see also, e. g. Carlsson et al, 1992, andEklund et al, 2007). Let D = {d 1 , d 2 , …, d n } be the set of the decision makers of a committee, A = {a 1 , a 2 , …, a m } the set of alternatives, and C = {c 1 , c 2 , …, c p } the set of the accepted criteria.…”

“…Dynamics of consensus enhancing process is managed by the chairman by introducing in R m a metric, e. g. the Euclidean metric, that acts between couples of points of R m associated to decision makers. For instance, (see Carlsson et al, 1992, andEklund et al, 2007), we can assume that the distance between the decision makers d r and d s is given by the formula:…”

Weighting Individual Opinions in Group Decision Making

“…One of them is related to an interactive and sequential procedure where decision makers have to change their preferences in order to improve the agreement. Usually, a moderator advise decision makers to modify some opinions (see, for instance, Eklund, Rusinowska and de Swart [8]). …”