Managing Consistency and Consensus Issues in Group Decision-Making with Self-Confident Additive Preference Relations and Without Feedback: A Nonlinear Optimization Method

Preference relations are one of the most common tools used to represent decision makers’ preferences. Self-confident preference relations, whose preference elements include self-confidence levels and preference values, is a new and effective tool that can be used to express decision makers’ self-confidence levels in the preference relation. When using self-confident preference relations in group decision-making problems, the individual consistency and group consensus are two fundamental issues. To deal with these issues, a consistency index is proposed to measure the consistency level of a self-confident additive preference relation. Meanwhile, a consensus index is presented to measure the group consensus level of self-confident additive preference relations. Subsequently, two nonlinear optimization methods are developed to manage consistency and consensus issues for group decision-making within the context of consensus reaching without feedback. The first model is used to derive self-confident additive preference relations with acceptable consistency, and the second optimization model is employed to promote consensus reaching that simultaneously manage individual consistency. A hypothetical application with comparative analysis is conducted to show the usability and validity of the proposed methods.