Multi-Stakeholder Consensus Decision-Making Framework Based on Trust: A Generic Framework

The decision-making process is one we encounter in every aspect of our lives. Decision-making becomes more challenging when dealing with multi-stakeholder decisions due to the existence of conflicts among them and the diversity in their expertise. As a result, the influence among them, which is represented by trust, is considered to be an important criterion when one is making a final decision. Such trust is a result of the interactions among those stakeholders. Rating is one of the methods that stakeholders use in their interactions to express their opinions of one another. It requires a decision that is agreed upon by everyone; of course, it might take several rounds to reach a final consensus decision. In this research study, we built a consensus decision-making framework based on trust. The trust framework has been proposed previously and is based on measurement theory. Then, we developed software to simulate the decision-making scenarios to study the rating convergences in these decision-making rounds and to investigate their convergences with and without trust. This simulator was designed to emulate humans' behaviors from a social science perspective. Our result showed that measurement theory-based trust is useful in the consensus-creating process, as it decreases the number of necessary rounds and even creates a consensus when an extreme conflict in preferences exists.