Using OWA operators to integrate group attitudes towards consensus

Abstract

Nowadays decisions that affect organizations or big amounts of people are normally made by a group of experts, rather than a single decision maker. These decisions would require more than a majority rule to be well-accepted. Consensus Reaching Processes in Group Decision Making Problems attempt to reach a mutual agreement before making a decision. A key issue in these processes is the adequate choice of a consensus measure, according to the group's needs and the context of the specific problem to solve. In this contribution, we introduce the concept of attitude towards consensus in consensus reaching processes, with the aim of integrating it in the consensus measures used throughout the consensus process by means of a novel aggregation operator based on OWA, so-called Attitude-OWA (AOWA). © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.