Identifying blocking behaviors in small‐scale group decision‐making and their impact on consensus outcomes: A case study on forest management

Abstract

AbstractGroup decision‐making (GDM) problems usually include stakeholders with different views and opinions. In order to find a collective solution, it is necessary to achieve a consensus reaching process (CRP) that may lead to the emergence of non‐cooperative behaviors within the group. This article proposes to study how these non‐cooperative behaviors appear in a group of decision‐makers and what their level of impact is on the evolution of consensus and on the final decision. To provide some answers to this research problem, we propose a multi‐criteria decision‐making (MCDM) methodology implementing analytic hierarchy process (AHP) in order to provide a visualization of the CRP evolution and observe four non‐cooperative behaviors within small‐scale GDM: (1) collective agreement, (2) blocking behavior, (3) leadership demonstration, and (4) experts' coalition. We implement our methodology within a pedagogical framework, in 29 small‐scale groups of masters and engineering students, through a case study related to the implementation of forest management scenarios in France. Our results show the evolution of the four non‐cooperative behaviors within the groups, as well as their impact on the CRP outcomes.