Verification Mechanism for Online Responses in Criteria Prioritization

Abstract

In online criteria prioritization questionnaires, the respondents are not given an opportunity to verify and deliberate the reasons for each response. This paper describes a novel way to acquire the reasons and contexts behind the prioritization of criteria or alternatives, through a verification mechanism together with a set of logical rules. Essentially, a respondent is expected to visually verify the online responses against the reasons behind the prioritization of each pair of alternatives or criteria. A rule-based approach is then adopted to validate and display the inconsistent responses. Each respondent is expected to correct all detected inconsistency by recording the appropriate reasons and contexts in some concept maps. The resulting verification mechanism could be further enhanced and used as an intelligent organizational knowledge creation and maintenance framework for personalizing a group decision support setting.