Approval consensus measures

Alcantud, José Carlos R. and de Andres Calle, Rocio and Cascon, José Manuel (2012): Approval consensus measures.

Abstract

In many realistic group decision making problems where a “representative” collective output must be produced, it is relevant to measure how much consensus this solution conveys to the group. Many aspects influence the final decision in group decision making problems. Two key issues are the experts’ individual opinions and the methodology followed to compute such a final decision (aggregation operators, voting systems, etc.). In this paper we consider situations where each member of a population decides upon approving or not approving each of a set of options. The experts express their opinions in a dichotomous way, e.g., because they intend to use approval voting. In order to measure the consensus or cohesiveness that the expression of the individual preferences conveys we propose the concept of approval consensus measure (ACM), which does not refer to any priors of the agents like preferences or other decision-making processes. Then we give axiomatic characterizations of two generic classes of ACMs.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Approval voting, Consensus measures, Tanimoto similarity index
• Subjects: D - Microeconomics > D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making > D71 - Social Choice ; Clubs ; Committees ; Associations

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