A two-fold feedback mechanism to support consensus-reaching in social network group decision-making.

This study focuses on consensus-reaching in social network group decision-making. Using Archimedean t-norms and t-conorms as the basis, this study introduces a family of interval-valued dual trust propagation (IVDTP) operators. A perfect knowledge degree-induced ordered weighted averaging (PKD-IOWA) aggregation operator is also put forward for obtaining the overall trust and distrust values. The proposed PKD-IOWA aggregation operator makes full use of the knowledge in each trust path, which can effectively overcome the limitations of existing trust aggregation operators. The weights of the experts can then be derived by combining the IVDTP operators and the PKD-IOWA aggregation operator. Three levels of consensus indices are defined to identify the incompatible experts in a group. A two-fold feedback mechanism comprising a judgment feedback mechanism (JFM) and a weight feedback mechanism (WFM), is designed to reach consensus. In each round of this interaction model, the most incompatible expert is advised to modify his/her judgments on the basis of the JFM. If the expert rejects the suggestion, then his/her weight will be reduced according to the WFM, which can act as an incentive or penalty to force him/her to accept the judgment feedback suggestion. Two illustrative examples are used to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach, followed by comparative analysis and discussion.