Flexible negotiation process to adhere to human preferences; A case of work equipment risk assessment

Abstract

Making structured and reliable decisions on relevant business problems often requires expert assistance. In decision making practice, experts are frequently required to pairwise compare elements to support the decision made. This paper proposes a user-friendly negotiation procedure to establish an effective feedback relation with experts to globally increase the consistency of their pairwise comparisons judgments, where necessary. To this aim, we develop a flexible tool, which makes use of an algebraic consistency-improving algorithm and a sensitivity analysis technique to identify which judgments contribute most to inconsistency. The framework pursues friendliness for the involved decision makers, as they are asked to reconsider only a few a priori judgments, instead of rethinking the entire set of previously elicited comparisons. A real-world case study on risk assessment in industry is implemented to demonstrate the practical applicability of the proposed approach.