An improved method on group decision making based on interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy prioritized operators

Interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy prioritized operators are widely used in group decision making under uncertain environment due to its flexibility to model uncertain information. However, there is a shortcoming in the existing aggregation operators (interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy prioritized weighted average (IVIFPWA)) to deal with group decision making in some extreme situations. For example, when an expert gives an absolute negative evaluation, the operators could lead to irrational results, so that they are not effectively enough to handle group decision making. In this paper, several examples are illustrated to show the unreasonable results in some of these situations. Actually, these unreasonable cases are common for operators in dealing with product averaging, not only emerging in IVIFPWA operators. To overcome the shortcoming of these kinds of operators, an improvement of making slight adjustment on initial evaluations is provided. Numerical examples are used to show the efficiency of the improvement. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.