A Generic Software to Support Collective Decision in Food Chains and in Multi-Stakeholder Situations

International audienceMyChoice is a user-friendly web-based application supporting collective decision, developed by INRAE (French National Institute of Research for Agriculture, Food and the Environment). It is designed to analyse, compare and assess the acceptability of different alternatives-e.g. technologies, food processes, variants of a product, etc.-, based on explicative arguments stemming from various sources and stakeholders, regarding different criteria and aims. It is well-suited for accompanying news trends and developments in food chains, requiring the adhesion and cooperation of various stakeholders. Nevertheless, its design is generic and may also be applied to different fields. This paper presents the design concepts of the software, stemming from different disciplines-multicriteria decision, AI argumentation, database information systems, social psychology-, its features and expected future developments

A qualitative decision-making approach overlapping argumentation and social choice

National audienceCollective decision making is classically done via social choice theory with each individual expressing preferences as a (total) order over a given set of alternatives, and the group’s aggregated preference is computed using a voting rule. However, such methods do not take into account the rationale behind preferences. Our research hypothesis is that a decision made by participants understanding the qualitative rationale (i.e., arguments) behind each other’s preferences has better chances to be accepted and used in practice. To this end, we propose a novel qualitative decision process which combines argumentation with computational social choice. We show that a qualitative approach based on argumentation can overcome some of the social choice deficiencies