Group decision making procedure considering preference strength under incomplete information

Abstract

This article deals with the multiple criteria decision making problem with incomplete information when multiple decision makers (Multiple Criteria Group Decision Making: MCGDM) are involved. Usually decision makers (DMs) are willing or able to provide only incomplete information, because of time pressure, lack of knowledge or data, and their limited expertise related to the problem domain. There have only been a few studies considering incomplete information in group settings. We also consider the case where importance weights are given incompletely. This article suggests the possibility that individually optimized results can be used to build group consensus. Individual optimization results by pairwise dominance, contain useful information in forming consensus, such as, ordinal rankings or preference intensity of an alternative over the others. Rather than using ordinal rankings for aggregation which do not consider preference strength, we suggest a procedure that takes account of individual DMs' preference strength. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.