Three-way group consensus decision based on hierarchical social network consisting of decision makers and participants

Abstract

In group decision making (GDM) of organization management, information interaction usually occurs via the hierarchical social networks. In the hierarchical social networks, the relation and opinion exchange between decision makers and participants can influence the consensus reaching of three-way group decision. In this paper, we deeply explore the three-way group decision consensus reaching by constructing adjustment mechanism based on the hierarchical social networks. In the hierarchical social network, we firstly learn the attitudes of participants for the opinions of decision makers. Inspired by the thought of three-way decision, we successfully identify the valid followers, hesitant followers and invalid follower of decision makers from the participants with the aid of the trust and consensus information. According to the character of followers, we compute the real influence of decision makers. Then, we discuss the consensus model. In the adjustment process of GDM of social network, the inconsistent decision makers tend to adjust evaluation based on the evaluation of the most influential decision makers. Thus, we introduce the maximum closeness degree between the inconsistent decision maker and the most influential decision maker to construct the minimum adjustment consensus model. Besides, we extend the minimum adjustment consensus model by considering the various unit cost and limited adjustment budget. In light of the consensual loss information and Bayesian decision theory, we determine the classification rules of three-way group decision. Finally, we use an example of the medical equipment selection of purchasing department to elaborate and validate our proposed method.