Managing non-cooperative behaviors in large-scale group decision making based on trust relationships and confidence levels of decision makers

In large-scale group decision making events, diverse backgrounds of decision makers (DMs) may result in various non-cooperative behaviors as they pursue personal interests, thereby causing significant harm to the decision making process. Instead of solely analyzing DMs’ evaluations in detecting traditional non-cooperative behaviors, this study defines three new categories of non-cooperative behaviors by integrating DMs’ evaluations with their personal attributes, such as confidence levels and trust relationships. These new behaviors include bribery behavior, passive participation behavior, and potential conflict behavior. To address these behaviors, this research proposes a confidence and trust-based consensus reaching process (CT-CRP). Within CT-CRP, three distinct acceptance functions for DMs are introduced, which are utilized to describe the likelihood of DMs accepting recommended plans and determining an optimal modification rate. Lastly, an illustrative example and several experiments are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and validity of CT-CRP in enhancing consensus among DMs.