A novel approach for combination of individual and group decisions based on fuzzy best-worst method

The process of decision-making in an enterprise may either keep the business on track or derail it. Thus, a senior decision maker often use a group of experts as the supportive team to ensure appropriate decisions. The experts often have different expertise level regarding their knowledge, talent, proficiency, and experience. In this study, we first extend the best-worst method based on the linguistic preferences of decision-makers about importance of attributes. These preferences are converted into triangular fuzzy numbers to be utilized in the linear programming model. That is, in contrast with the original best-worst method in which the preferences towards the attributes are crisp, fuzzy preferences are considered in the proposed method to reflect the imprecise comments of experts. Second, we propose a novel group decision making approach based on the fuzzy best-worst method to combine the opinion of senior decision-maker and the opinions of the experts. Indeed, our model helps the senior decision maker to make a significant trade-off between democratic and autocratic decision-making styles. From sensitivity analyses on two numerical examples, we show that, when there is conflict between senior decision-maker and group of decision-makers, the consistency of group decision-making (democracy) will increase as it tends to individual decision-making (autocracy). (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.