Consensus reaching process in large-scale group decision making based on opinion leaders

Abstract

With the development of science and technology, large-scale group decision making based on social network has become a crucial issue, and opinion leaders play an increasingly important role in the process of opinion dissemination and information transmission by virtue of their own influence, even affect the direction of decision-making. This paper proposes a framework of consensus reaching process for large-scale groups based on opinion leaders. In this framework, we first use the fast unfolding algorithm to divide the large-scale group into several small sub-clusters, and identify the opinion leaders of each sub-cluster. Then, we aggregate the opinions of the opinion leaders in each sub-cluster and construct the group decision matrix with the opinions of each sub-cluster as a new whole. A feedback mechanism based on opinion leaders is developed to help the opinion leaders who do not reach a consensus change their opinions to promote consensus. Finally, a numerical example about emergency shelter selection is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.