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In group decisions, achieving consensus is important, because it increases commitment to the result. For cooperative groups, Combinatorial Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis (CMAA) is a group decision framework that can achieve consensus efficiently. It is based on a novel Combinatorial Acceptability Entropy (CAE) consensus metric. As an output measure, the CAE metric is unique in its ability to identify the evaluations that have the greatest impact on consensus and to prevent premature consensus. This paper is intended to complement the original CMAA publication by providing additional insights into the CAE consensus metric. The design requirements for the CAE algorithm are presented, and it is shown how these requirements follow from the properties of cooperative decisions. The CAE-based consensus-building algorithm is contrasted both qualitatively and quantitatively with a representative example of the conventional input distance and input averaging approach to multi-criteria consensus-building. A simulation experiment illustrates the ability of the CAE-based algorithm to converge quickly to the correct decision as defined for cooperative decisions. The metric is able to meet a new, more stringent definition of hard consensus. The CAE approach highlights the need to distinguish between competitive and cooperative group decisions. Attention in the literature has been paid almost exclusively to the former type; the CAE approach demonstrates the greater efficiency and effectiveness that can be achieved with an approach that is designed specifically for the latter.

Planning a city is a systematic process that includes time, space, and groups of people who must communicate. However, due to security problems in such war-ravaged countries as Afghanistan, the traditional forms of public participation in the planning process are untenable. In particular, due to gathering space difficulties and culture issues in Afghanistan, women and religious minorities are restricted from joining male-dominated powerholders’ face-to-face meetings which are nearly always held in fixed places called masjids (religious buildings). Furthermore, conducting such discussions with human facilitation biases the generation of citizen decisions that stimulates an atmosphere of confrontation, causing another decision problem for urban policy-making institutions. Therefore, it is critical to find approaches that not only securely revolutionize participative processes but also provide meaningful and equal public consultation to support interactions among stakeholders to solve their shared problems together. Toward this end, we propose a joint research program, namely, crowd-based communicative and deliberative e-planning (CCDP), a blended approach, which is a mixture of using an artificial-intelligence-led technology, decision-support system called D-Agree and experimental participatory planning in Kabul, Afghanistan. For the sake of real-world implementation, Nagoya Institute of Technology (Japan) and Kabul Municipality (Afghanistan) have formed a novel developed and developing world partnership by using our proposed methodology as an emerging-deliberation mechanism to reframe public participation in urban planning processes. In the proposed program, Kabul municipality agreed to use our methodology when Kabul city needs to make a plan with people. This digital field study presents the first practical example of using online decision support systems in the context of the neighborhood functions of Gozars, which are Kabul’s social and spatial urban units. The main objective was to harness the wisdom of the crowd to innovative suggestions for helping policymakers making strategic development plans for Gozars using open call ideas, and for responding to equal participation and consultation needs, specifically for women and minorities. This article presents valuable insights into the benefits of this combined approach as blended experience for societies and cities that are suffering long-term distress. This initiative has influenced other local Afghan governments, including the cities of Kandahar and Herat as well as the country’s central government’s ministry of urban planning and land, which has officially expressed its intention to collaborate with us.

Collective action theory, as formulated in the social sciences, posits rational social actors who regularly assess the actions of others to inform their own decisions to cooperate. In anthropological archaeology, collective action theory is now being used to investigate the dynamics of large-scale polities of the past. Building on the work of Margaret Levi, collective action theorists argue that the more principals (rulers) depended on the populace for labor, tribute, or other revenues, the greater the agency (or \"voice\") a population had in negotiating public benefits. In this review, we evaluate collective action theory, situating it in relation to existing theoretical approaches that address cooperation, consensus building, and nonelite agency in the past. We draw specific attention to the importance of analyzing agency at multiple scales as well as how institutions articulate shared interests and order sociopolitical and economic interaction. Finally, we argue for a new synthesis of political economy approaches with collective action theory.

In this paper the author describes a new qualitative analytic technique that she has been perfecting across a range of health research studies. She describes the summative analysis method, which is a group, collaborative analytic technique that concentrates on consensus-building activities, illustrating its use within a study of Holocaust survivor testimony that aimed to clarify how health and well-being were presented in Holocaust testimonials and what that might reveal about professional perceptions of trauma suffering. The author contextualizes the four stages of summative analysis with data from one Holocaust survivor's health interviews. The Holocaust study is briefly described, as is the survivor's background and experiences during the war. The author reflects on the study data and offers examples of individual and group analysis exercises to represent the method in practice. The author concludes with a consideration of the wider uses and implications of summative analysis within health and social scientific contexts.

We present a model of opinion formation where an individual’s opinion is influenced by interactions with a group of agents. The model introduces a novel bias mechanism that favors one opinion, a feature not previously explored. In the absence of bias, the system reduces to a mean field voter model. We identify three regimes: favoring negative opinions, favoring positive opinions, and a neutral case. In large systems, equilibrium outcomes become independent of group size, with only the bias influencing the final consensus. For smaller groups, however, the time to reach equilibrium depends on group size. Our results show that even a small initial bias leads to a consensus, with all agents eventually sharing the same opinion if the bias is not zero. The system also exhibits critical slowing down near the neutral bias, which acts as a dynamical threshold. The time to reach consensus scales logarithmically for non-neutral biases and linearly with system size for the neutral case. While short-term dynamics are influenced by group size, long-term behavior is determined solely by the bias.

In the process of reaching consensus, it is necessary to coordinate different views to form a general group opinion. However, there are many uncertain factors in this process, which has brought different degrees of influence in group decision-making. Besides, these uncertain elements bring the risk of loss to the whole process of consensus building. Currently available models not account for these two aspects. To deal with these issues, three different modeling methods for constructing the two-stage mean-risk stochastic minimum cost consensus models (MCCMs) with asymmetric adjustment cost are investigated. Due to the complexity of the resulting models, the L-shaped algorithm is applied to achieve an optimal solution. In addition, a numerical example of a peer-to-peer online lending platform demonstrated the utility of the proposed modeling approach. To verify the result obtained by the L-shaped algorithm, it is compared with the CPLEX solver. Moreover, the comparison results show the accuracy and efficiency of the given method. Sensitivity analyses are undertaken to assess the impact of risk on results. And in the presence of asymmetric cost, the comparisons between the new proposed risk-averse MCCMs and the two-stage stochastic MCCMs and robust consensus models are also given.

There are two different approaches to involve participants in consecutive rounds of a Delphi survey: (1) invitation to every round independent of response to the previous round (“all-rounds”) and (2) invitation only when responded to the previous round (“respondents-only”). This study aimed to investigate the effect of invitation approach on the response rate and final outcome of a Delphi survey. Both experts (N = 188) and patients (N = 188) took part in a Delphi survey to update the core outcome set (COS) for axial spondyloarthritis. A study with 1:1 allocation to two experimental groups (ie, “all-rounds” [N = 187] and “respondents-only” [N = 189]) was built-in. The overall response rate was lower in the “respondents-only group” (46%) compared to the “all-rounds group” (61%). All domains that were selected for inclusion in the COS by the “respondents-only group” were also selected by the “all-rounds group.” Additionally, the four most important domains were identical between groups after the final round, with only minor differences in the other domains. Inviting panel members who missed a round to a subsequent round will lead to a better representation of opinions of the originally invited panel and reduces the chance of false consensus, while it does not influence the final outcome of the Delphi.

Purpose>The purpose of this study is to examine how accountability is constructed for blockchain systems. With the aim of increasing knowledge on accountability across three different types of blockchains (public, private and consortium), the researchers ask: how do blockchain systems construct accountability?Design/methodology/approach>This study draws on theorising in the accountability literature to study how blockchains relate to our construction and understanding of accountability. A qualitative field study of the Australian blockchain technology landscape is conducted, with insights garnered from 18 blockchain experts.Findings>Findings reveal that different types of blockchains employ different forms and mechanisms of accountability and in novel ways previously less acknowledged in the literature. Importantly, this study finds that accountability does not require a principal–agent relation and can still manifest in less pure applications of blockchain technology across a wide range of stakeholders, contrary to that espoused in earlier exhortations of blockchain use in interdisciplinary literature. This study also finds that similar subtypes of accountability operate very differently across public, private and consortium blockchains and there exists an inverse relation between trust and consensus building through transparency as blockchains progress from public to private types. Overall, this study offers novel explanations for the relevance of greater accountability in blockchains, especially when the assumptions of public blockchains are softened and applied as private and consortium blockchains.Originality/value>This study contributes to the accountability literature by addressing how different blockchain systems reshape the understanding of traditional accounting and accountability practices. This study questions the very need for a principal–agent relation to facilitate accountability and offers an additional perspective to how trust and transparency operate as key mechanisms of accountability.

As a generalized fuzzy number, the hesitant fuzzy element (HFE) has been receiving increased attention and has recently become a popular topic. However, we find that the occurring probabilities of the possible values in the HFE are equal, which is obviously impractical. Consequently, in this paper, we propose a hesitant fuzzy number with probabilities, called the hesitant probabilistic fuzzy number, and construct its score function, deviation function, comparison laws, and its basic operations. It is well known that in the context of a group of decision makers (DMs), one of the basic approaches to built consensus is to aggregate individual evaluations or individual priorities. Thus, to use the hesitant fuzzy numbers for consensus building with a group of DMs, we further propose a method called maximizing score deviation method to obtain the DMs’ weights under the HPFE environment, based on which two extended and four new ordered weighted operators are provided to fuse the HPFE information and build the consensus of the DMs. We also analyze the differences among these ordered weighted operators and provide their application scopes. Finally, a practical case is provided to demonstrate consensus building with a group of DMs under the HPFE environment using the proposed approaches.

Our research highlights the structuring effect of initiatives that mobilize social economy and community action resources with the aim of promoting the conversion of local spaces and the implementation of a dynamic of local development and socioterritorial inclusion. Using the case study of the establishment of La TOHU in the Saint-Michel neighbourhood in Montreal (Quebec, Canada), for which we conducted a literature review and an interview survey, we show how urban conflicts contributed to the construction of a cohesive environment. In the path taken by Saint-Michel, one of the most sensitive neighbourhoods in Canada, our conflict analysis sheds light on (1) the relationship between urban conflicts and legitimate representation for sites of consensus-building, (2) the importance of the instances allowing for debate and discussion between the various types of actors (social, business community, public) such as to generate strong coalitions centered on the social development of the local community and the improvement of the quality of life for citizens, and (3) the relationship between consensus-building among the actors and the development of compromises for the territory under study. The debates provoked by the conflicts thus allowed for the social construction of rallying points, which in turn promoted the reaching of compromises, in this case, the one leading to the establishment of La TOHU. However, although La TOHU was a success as a strategy of integration and socio-territorial connectivity, the roots of the borough's socio-economic problems have not been resolved: Saint-Michel is still a poor neighbourhood in which socio-territorial exclusion has not disappeared. Finally, the 2008 riots which took place in Montreal-North, an adjacent neighbourhood, point to an important direction to pursue in our continuing research on the role and place of conflicts in socio-territorial regulation: the analysis of ethnic riots and conflicts related to social integration. Nos travaux mettent en lumière l'effet structurant des initiatives qui mobilisent des ressources de l'économie sociale et de l'action communautaire en vue d'assurer une reconversion des espaces locaux et de mettre en place des dynamiques de développement local et d'inclusion socioterritoriale. À l'aide de l'étude de cas de l'établissement de la TOHU (1999) dans le quartier Saint-Michel à Montréal, pour laquelle nous avons mené une recension des écrits et une enquête par entrevues, nous montrons comment les conflits urbains ont participé à la construction d'un milieu cohésif. Dans la trajectoire de développement de Saint-Michel, l'un des quartiers les plus sensibles au Canada, l'analyse des conflits donne à voir (1) le rapport entre conflits urbains et légitimation de la représentativité dans les lieux de concertation, (2) l'importance des instances permettant le débat et la discussion entre les divers types d'acteurs (sociaux, milieux des affaires, publics) de façon à générer des coalitions fortes centrées sur le développent social de la collectivité locale et sur l'amélioration de la qualité de vie des citoyens et (3) le rapport entre la concertation entre les acteurs et le développement de compromis sur le territoire à l'étude, car les débats provoqués par les conflits permettent la construction sociale de points de ralliement, lesquels favorisent le développement de compromis tel celui ayant conduit à l'établissement de la TOHU. Cependant, même si en tant que stratégie d'intégration et de connectivité socioterritoriale, la TOHU est une réussite, il n'en demeure pas moins que les problèmes socioéconomiques ne sont pas résolus à la base : Saint-Michel demeure un quartier pauvre d'où l'exclusion socioterritoriale n'est pas disparue. Enfin, à la lumière des émeutes de Montréal-Nord (2008), quartier adjacent, une piste de recherche importante se dégage de nos travaux pour continuer notre réflexion sur le rôle et la place des conflits dans la régulation socioterritoriale : l'analyse des luttes autour d'enjeux ethniques et des conflits liés à l'intégration sociale.