Identifying blocking behaviors in small-scale group decision-making and their impact on consensus outcomes: A case study on forest management

Abstract

Group decision-making (GDM) problems usually include stakeholders with different views and opinions. In order to find a collective solution, it is necessary to achieve a consensus reaching process (CRP) that may lead to the emergence of non-cooperative behaviors within the group. This article proposes to study how these non-cooperative behaviors appear in a group of decision-makers and what their level of impact is on the evolution of consensus and on the final decision. To provide some answers to this research problem, we propose a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methodology implementing analytic hierarchy process (AHP) in order to provide a visualization of the CRP evolution and observe four non-cooperative behaviors within small-scale GDM: (1) collective agreement, (2) blocking behavior, (3) leadership demonstration, and (4) experts' coalition. We implement our methodology within a pedagogical framework, in 29 small-scale groups of masters and engineering students, through a case study related to the implementation of forest management scenarios in France. Our results show the evolution of the four non-cooperative behaviors within the groups, as well as their impact on the CRP outcomes.