A paired-comparison approach for fusing preference orderings from rank-ordered agents

The problem of aggregating multi-agent preference orderings has received considerable attention in many fields of research, such as multi-criteria decision aiding and social choice theory; nevertheless, the case in which the agents’ importance is expressed in the form of a rank-ordering, instead of a set of weights, has not been much debated. The aim of this article is to present a novel algorithm – denominated as ‘‘Ordered Paired-Comparisons Algorithm’’ (OPCA), which addresses this decision-making problem in a relatively simple and practical way. The OPCA is organized into three main phases: (i) turning multi- agent preference orderings into sets of paired comparisons, (ii) synthesizing the paired-comparison sets, and (iii) constructing a fused (or consensus) ordering. Particularly interesting is phase two, which introduces a new aggregation process based on a priority sequence, obtained from the agents’ importance rank-ordering. A detailed description of the new algorithm is supported by practical examples

An evidential reasoning based approach for decision making with partially ordered preference under uncertainty

In many cases, decision making is to order alternatives and select one or a few among the top of the ranking based on decision makers’ preferences. Due to the complexity and flexibility of reality, decision makers usually can only provide partially ordered preferences with certain belief degrees. In order to deal with this kind of decision making problem, we introduce in this paper the use a belief structure for representing the involved partially ordered preferences with belief degrees, then a preference combination approach based on evidential reasoning is proposed to combine the preferences from different decision makers. The final ranking of alternatives is generated based on a distance measure between pairs of preference relations. An illustrative example is provided to show the rationality of the proposed method