•Define some consistency indexes for a hesitant fuzzy preference relation (HFPR).•Develop some minimum adjustment-based models to improve the consistency for an HFPR.•Numerical examples demonstrate ...the advantages of the models.
Hesitant fuzzy preference relation (HFPR) is an effective tool to elicit decision makers’ hesitant preference information over alternatives, and consistency analysis is of great importance for an HFPR since inconsistent judgments may result in unreasonable results. In this paper, the best additive consistency index, the worst additive consistency index and the average additive consistency index are defined to measure the consistency level of an HFPR. To improve the additive consistency of an HFPR, some mixed 0–1 linear programming models which aim to minimize the overall adjustment amount and the number of the elements that need to be adjusted are established. Moreover, the proposed models are extended to improve the additive consistency and impute the missing elements for incomplete HFPRs. Some numerical examples are presented to show the characteristics of the proposed models. The results demonstrate that the proposed models can improve the consistency of an HFPR effectively.
Polarization in a group’s opinions drives to disagreements and dissent among individuals, which make it harder to achieve group satisfactory decisions. Within Group Decision Making (GDM) problems to ...soften disagreements, lots of consensus reaching processes (CRPs) have been proposed to converge opinions but rarely consider the existing dynamic relationships among the experts. Meanwhile, Opinion Dynamics studies the evolution of opinions based on the relationships existing among the group members by using Social Network Analysis (SNA). In real-world GDM problems the application of CRPs alone may not be enough to achieve the desired level of agreement when there is too much dissent among experts. In this paper, a novel framework is proposed that hybridizes both the process of making closer opinions realized by CRPs and the evolving relationships among experts based on SNA. This new framework addresses when it might be impossible to achieve the agreement through CRPs, which tries to achieve a potential consensus considering that if opinions are too polarized, maybe different stable opinions states are still suitable and easier to achieve by applying a SNA together with the CRP. This framework is further analyzed through simulation experiments for demonstrating its validity and some properties.
In group decision making, a certain degree of consensus is necessary to derive a meaningful and valid outcome. This paper proposes a consensus reaching model for a group by using the Analytic ...Hierarchy Process （AHP）. It supports people to improve their group consensus level through an updating of their judgments. In this model, a moderator suggests the most discoraant aeclslon manet to update his judgment in each step. The proposed consensus reaching model allows decision makers to accept or reject the suggestion from the moderator. This model ensures that the judgment updating is effective and the final solution will be of acceptable consistency. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the validity of the proposed consensus reaching model.
•A dynamic adaptive group AHP consensus reaching model.•Prioritizing decision makers based on a Markov chain method.•A peer to peer opinion comparison and exchange method.•An automatic feedback ...mechanism as the engine of the dynamic adaptive consensus model.
Consensus reaching models are widely applied in group decision making problems to improve the group's consensus level before making a common decision. Within the context of the group Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a novel consensus reaching model in a dynamic decision environment is proposed. A Markov chain method can be used to determine the decision makers’ weights of importance for the aggregation process with respect to the group members’ opinion transition probabilities. The proposed group consensus reaching model facilitates a peer to peer opinion exchange process which relieves the group of the need for a moderator by using an automatic feedback mechanism. Moreover, as the elements in the group decision framework change in a dynamic decision making problem, this model provides feedback suggestions that adaptively adjust for each of the decision makers depending on his credibility in each round. The full process of the dynamic adaptive consensus reaching model is presented and its properties are discussed. Finally, a numerical example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.
Due to the rapid development of information technology, an increasing number of smokers choose online smoking cessation communities to interact with other individuals to help themselves quit smoking. ...Though it is well known that social support plays a key role in the process of smoking cessation, the features of social support that one can get from online smoking cessation communities remain unclear. We collected user interaction data from the largest Chinese online smoking cessation community, the quit smoking forum of Baidu Tieba. We selected 2758 replies from 29 active repliers and 408 correlated posts as our data set. Multidimensional content analysis is carried out from three aspects: posting scenarios, user quitting behavior stages, and types of social support. This article also explores the co-occurrence relationships of different types of social support by social network analysis. Results showed that users receive different compositions of social support in various posting scenarios and behavior stages. In most cases, emotional support is the most typical support the community provides. The community will provide more informational support when needed. Besides, informational support, especially personal experience and perceptual knowledge, has more diverse combination patterns with other types of social support. “Gratitude-Mutual assistance” and “Encouragement-Mutual assistance” are the most frequent co-occurrence relationships. The online smoking cessation community brings people who quit smoking together, and users provide rich types of social support for each other. Users can effectively obtain expected social support in different posting scenarios and smoking cessation stages. Smoking cessation projects should be designed to promote user communication and interaction, which positively affects achieving users’ smoking cessation goals.
In the current business environment, both managers and researchers have realized that assessing and managing risk in a supply chain operation is crucial to business success. Furthermore, the ...traditional assessment methodologies are unable to deal with intangible criteria which are crucial factor in the analysis. Thus, we develop an orders-of-magnitude AHP (OM-AHP) based ex-ante supply chain risk assessment model, to enable the comparison of the tangible and intangible elements that influence supply chain risks. In the application of OM-AHP method to risk assessment it also became apparent a formal guiding structure of how to pivot using OM-AHP did not exist. A formal method is proposed that can significantly reduce the number of needed comparisons and improve the consistency with pairwise comparisons matrices under any AHP decision. The process of the proposed supply chain risk assessment framework consists of three phases: risk identification, risk assessment, and risk ranking and analysis. An illustrative example is provided to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed risk assessment framework. The results are organized in a 2-way risk matrix based on their probability and consequence severity and tested for robustness via sensitivity analysis.
Opinion dynamics (OD) models, which simulate individuals’ opinion evolution process on social network to analyze the final state of opinion distribution in a group, usually differ from each other due ...to the differences in social network evolution rules and opinion evolution rules. However, most existing social network evolution rules and opinion evolution rules usually cannot characterize the comprehensive influence of key factors such as neighbors and opinion differences in social relationships. To fully consider the properties of social network evolution and improve the efficiency of consensus reaching process in group decision making, this paper introduces the concept of local world opinion derived from individuals’ common friends, and then proposes an individual and local world opinion-based OD model. In the proposed model, social network evolution is jointly determined by the distance between individual opinions and network structure similarity. The pair of individuals with the largest consensus improvement space are then suggested to adjust their opinions by using an adaptive individual opinion adjustment mechanism. Finally, detailed simulation results are provided to demonstrate the convergence of the proposed model and analyze different parameters’ effects on the stabilized time steps and the number of stable state opinion clusters.
•An adaptive opinion dynamics model integrates individual and local world opinions.•Social network evolution rules consider the integrated effects of social relationship.•Opinion adjustment rules address the situation when opinions are incompatible.•The parameter impacts on time steps and the number of opinion clusters are analyzed.
Improving relations between the People＇s Republic of China （PRC） and the United States of America （US） and ensuring that they work together as allies rather than as competitors can serve as a ...stabilizing force against armed conflict, particularly with surrounding nations. The economic, social, and political relationships between the PRC and US have progressed along a hilly journey. As the second largest economy in the world, the PRC has continued to develop its military and is determined to climb the technological ladder. This growth has led the US and the PRC to be referred to as a G-2 of superpowers. As the US hegemony continues to weaken this G-2 relationship is becoming more important. With significant economic, political, and security issues at stake it is crucial that efforts to strengthen these relations are prioritized and implemented. A rigorous prioritization process, the Analytic Network Process （ANP） is used herein to prioritize the efforts and initiatives in the G-2 relationship. The model is presented with results and the extensive sensitivity analysis present additional insight into the suggested solutions.
Given the accessibility and anonymity features of social media platforms, ordinary users have emerged as facilitators of misinformation dissemination. An effective countermeasure is to encourage ...these users share fact-checking, which not only curbs the further dissemination of false information but also rectifies the beliefs of those previously misinformed. Based on Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) and Social Exchange Theory (SET), this study constructed the influencing factors model of remedial behavior for misinformation. Ten research hypotheses were proposed and tested through the analysis by SmartPLS of 403 valid questionnaires collected from China in 2021. The results showed that for remedial attitude, it is self-efficacy, outcome expectation and perceived remedial effect of fact-checking that are positively correlated, while the perceived responsibility of misinformation and perceived risk are negatively correlated; remedial attitude are positively correlated with remedial behavior intention; fact-checking persuasion and reference group influence are both positively related to remedial attitude and remedial behavior intention, respectively. Additionally, this study verified the remedial attitude's mediating role as well as the perceived consequence severity's moderating role in remedial behavior. We also explored whether the mediating effect of remedial attitude on remedial behavior was moderated by perceived consequence severity. This work could enrich the achievements in the field of social media users' information sharing behavior, and offer actionable insights for addressing misinformation.
•Integrates SCT and SET to model misinformation remedial behavior determinants.•Explores remedial attitude mediation and perceived consequence severity moderation.•Perceived benefit and cost dimensions jointly impact remedial attitude.•Fact-checking persuasion and reference group boost remedial attitude and intention.
• A Dynamic Group Consensus reaching process is proposed.• This approach uses twofold feedback mechanism: judgment feedback and priority weighting.• Group AHP is applied to Supplier Involvement in ...Collaborative Product Development.• Application of the method within the Chery company case study.
The group Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is an effective tool to collect experts’ wisdom to evaluate complex decision making problems. Because judgments are always diverse in the real world, it is crucial to adequately support the consensus reaching process. In this paper, we develop a convergent group AHP consensus reaching model with a twofold feedback mechanism, which consists of both a judgment and a weighting feedback mechanism. In each round of this dynamic and interactive model, the most incompatible expert is asked to revise her judgment according to the judgment feedback mechanism. If the expert rejects the suggestion, her weight of importance will be adjusted downward based on the compatibility within the group by the weighting feedback mechanism. The proof of convergence of this consensus reaching model with the twofold mechanism is also provided and discussed. Hence this proposed consensus reaching process supports the leader or client in reaching a successful decision with a dispersed group of experts. The proposed consensus reaching model is applied to the brake pad supplier selection problem of Chery Automobile Co., Ltd. The empirical example demonstrates that the proposed methodology provides an operational decision framework for companies to select suitable suppliers in the supplier involvement under the environment of collaborative product development (SICPD) through its successful application in that context
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