Consensus Reaching and Strategic Manipulation in Group Decision Making With Trust Relationships

To date, a large number of consensus reaching processes (CRPs) have been reported in group decision making (GDM). Trust relationships should be an essential element in interactions among a group of individuals, leading to the evolution of individuals' preferences. Therefore, in this article, we present a trust relationships CRP with a feedback mechanism which consists of two approaches of facilitating consensus reaching: 1) the leader-based preference adjustment and 2) the trust relationships improvement. In the trust relationships CRP, we build a bridge between opinion dynamics and GDM to highlight the role of the leaders and trust relationships improvements in the GDM problems. Furthermore, we present a new strategic manipulation issue, called trust relationship manipulation, and discuss some clique-based strategies to manipulate trust relationships to obtain the desired ranking of the alternatives in the GDM problems. Finally, the detailed simulation experiments are proposed to justify our proposal.

Automated summary

This article introduces a trust relationships CRP with a feedback mechanism, consisting of leader-based preference adjustment and trust relationships improvement. It bridges opinion dynamics and group decision making, highlighting the role of leaders and trust relationships in GDM problems. It also discusses a new strategic manipulation issue called trust relationship manipulation and presents clique-based strategies for manipulating trust relationships.