Exploiting game equilibrium mechanisms towards social trust-based group consensus reaching

Abstract

In group decision making (GDM), the real or virtual moderator usually provides the suggestion and compensation based on consensus improvement for the decision maker (DM) to promote group consensus. In order to ensure DMs own interests, there are the game among DMs and the game between DM and moderator to effect the consensus reaching. In this case, we analyze the inherent game reasons and investigate the game-driven consensus model. Firstly, based on the subjective trust of social network and the evaluation consensus of DMs, and inspired by the idea of data envelopment analysis (DEA), this paper explores the quantitative relation between subjective trust and the DMs’ consensus to determine the DM’s weights. Then, under the compensation of consensus improvement, we formulate game strategy between DMs and the moderator to ensure the DM’s consensus, which impacts the cooperation behavior between DM and the moderator. Based on the game strategy, we further establish bi-level game consensus model and investigate Nash equilibrium of group consensus model. Finally, the experiments are used to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed method, and comparative analysis demonstrates its advantages.