Expertise-Structure and Risk-Appetite-Integrated Two-Tiered Collective Opinion Generation Framework for Large-Scale Group Decision Making

The generation of collective preference assessments occupies a critical position in deriving accurate and reliable alternative rankings in the context of large-scale group decision making (LSGDM). In general, the collective opinion generation framework entails the following three phases, which are clustering analysis, weighting clusters, and preference aggregation. However, the clustering of experts has been frequently based on preference similarities among them without taking into account individual opinions in which knowledge elicitation plays a crucial role. The traditional collective opinion generation framework suffering from this drawback may result in unreliable decision outcomes. To this end, we propose an expertise-structure and risk-appetite-integrated two-tiered collective opinion generation framework to address this concern. The first tier of the two-tiered collective opinion generation framework divides the entire expert group into several subgroups based on individual expertise structures, which are extracted from hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS)-based preference assessments, and it then weighs the resulting clusters in accordance with the overall expertise levels. The second-tier clusters the first-tier subgroups conditioned on the indicator of individual assessment similarities and gathers the generated subgroup preference constructs in the use of the risk appetite-oriented power average operator. In addition, the notion of proportional HFLTSs was introduced to manifest collective evaluations in second-tier subgroups to eliminate information loss and distortion. The effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed collective opinion generation algorithm are eventually illustrated by a case study and a comparison analysis.