A Group DecisionMaking Methodology with Incomplet

Authors: Alfonso Mateos Antonio JiménezMartín Sixto RíosInsua

Publish Date: 2014/07/31

Volume: 24, Issue: 4, Pages: 633-653

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Abstract

We consider the situation where there are several alternatives for investing a quantity of money to achieve a set of objectives The choice of which alternative to apply depends on how citizens and political representatives perceive that such objectives should be achieved All citizens with the right to vote can express their preferences in the decisionmaking process These preferences may be incomplete Political representatives represent the citizens who have not taken part in the decisionmaking process The weight corresponding to political representatives depends on the number of citizens that have intervened in the decisionmaking process The methodology we propose needs the participants to specify for each alternative how they rate the different attributes and the relative importance of attributes On the basis of this information an expected utility interval is output for each alternative To do this an evidential reasoning approach is applied This approach improves the insightfulness and rationality of the decisionmaking process using a belief decision matrix for problem modeling and the Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence for attribute aggregation Finally we propose using the distances of each expected utility interval from the maximum and the minimum utilities to rank the alternative set The basic idea is that an alternative is ranked first if its distance to the maximum utility is the smallest and its distance to the minimum utility is the greatest If only one of these conditions is satisfied a distance ratio is then usedProf Sixto RíosInsua coauthor of this paper recently passed away after a long illness Sixto was a member of the Spanish Royal Doctoral Academy and cofounder and first president of the Spanish Group on MCDM He coauthored more than 70 papers in international scientific journals headed 14 national and international research projects and received several prestigious awards His teachings inspiration and spirit will remain among us

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