Synopses & Reviews
Consensus has been a much talked about word for centuries, maybe millennia since people have always been aware of its importance for arriving at proper decisions which have had a long lasting impact on life of groups of people, countries or even civilizations. Needless to say that the growing complexity of the present world, in all its social, economic and technological dimensions, has made the word to be used so frequently nowadays.
What concerns the way consensus is usually meant, by consensus it is meant, on the one hand, a general agreement within the group of people, or agents, both human and software. Clearly, in the strict meaning the general agreement has been viewed in the sense of a full and unanimous agreement. Since this may be an unreachable ideal, people have replaced this ideal concept by a more realistic one that encompasses all forms of partial, graded, etc. agreements within a group. This is also assumed on general in this volume.
The second sense of consensus is related to a process of reaching consensus which aims at reaching an agreement, possibly a high one, of all, or most, agents. It can involve the resolution and/or mitigation of some minor objections concerning options or aspects in question or individual agents involved. This second sense of consensus does involve the first one because the process of reaching an agreement must be related to some assessment of agreement within the group.
This volume is concerned with consensus reaching processes which may occur both within human groups and groups of intelligent agents. It is adopted, first of all, a modern and realistic definition of consensus that considers consensus not necessarily as full and unanimous agreement but as agreement to some extent. This calls for some soft computational tools and techniques, notably fuzzy and possibilistic ones to be able to account for imprecision in the very meaning of many concepts, issues and properties that play a role in both that more realistic definition of consensus and the very process of consensus reaching. In this setting a comprehensive coverage of various issues related to consensus and consensual processes is provided.
Synopsis
This volume explores consensus reaching processes occurring in both human groups and intelligent agents. The text provides a modern definition of consensus that calls for some soft computational tools and techniques.
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Table of Contents
Distance-based aggregation theory.- On penalty based aggregation functions and consensus.- Ranking alternatives in group decision-making with partial information: a stable approach.- Opinion changing aversion functions for group settlement modelling.- Statistical preference as a tool in consensus processes.- Consensus with oneself: within-person choice aggregation in the laboratory.- The social choice approach to group identification.- Consensus versus dichotomous voting.- On a priori evaluation of power of veto.- Settings of consensual processes: candidates, verdicts, policies.- Consensus perspectives: glimpses into theoretical advances and applications.- Measuring consensus: concepts, comparisons, and properties.- Measuring consensus in weak orders.- A qualitative reasoning approach to measure consensus.- On consensus in group decision making based on fuzzy preference relations.- Supporting consensus reaching processes under fuzzy preferences and a fuzzy majority via linguistic summaries and action rules.- Consensual processes based on mobile technologies and dynamic information.- Building consensus in on-line distributed decision making: interaction, aggregation and the construction of shared knowledge.- A Web-based consensus support system dealing with heterogeneous information.- A fuzzy hierarchical multiple criteria group decision support system - Decider - and its applications.- Product design compromise using consensus models.