Multiparticipant Decision-Making

Abstract

Two extreme types of methodologies are recognized when making choices involving multiple decision-makers. At one extreme are the models that simulate the spread of opinions. The other extreme is the simulation of spatial or networked games. This chapter applies self-organization to the assessment of forest sustainability. It seeks to develop a methodology to describe how sharing opinions with other evaluators allows individual opinions-that is, personal preferences for sustainability assessment-to be modified. The chapter applies a modification of market-scoring rules to aggregate the preference of multiple decision-makers to the assessment of forest sustainability. It applies the results provided by prediction markets to the aggregate assessments of sustainability made by multiple evaluators on the same forest. The chapter introduces the procedure the authors have chosen for making an interpersonal comparison of utility. It introduces an agent-based simulation to build a joint assessment for multidimensional problems, which has to be acceptable to multiple decision-makers.