Minimum Cost Consensus-Based Social Network Group Decision Making With Altruism-Fairness Preferences and Ordered Trust Propagation

Different from conventional decision-making environments, decision makers (DMs) in a community setting usually exhibit the complex social preferences and intricate social interactions, which may lead to high-decision costs for group consensus reaching. To address this challenge, we design a minimum cost consensus-based social network group decision making (SNGDM) approach considering altruism-fairness preferences and ordered trust propagation. First, a trust propagation method with order effect and path length is proposed to estimate the completed trust relationships among DMs in order to determine the weights of DMs. Then, inspired by the interaction of altruism and fairness preferences, we define the individual altruism-fairness preference utility function and utility level for cost consensus, and explore some properties. Afterwards, a new minimum cost consensus-based SNGDM with individual altruism-fairness preference utility is constructed. Finally, the validity of the proposed consensus framework is confirmed through the carbon reduction consensus problem of China’s aviation enterprises. Moreover, the sensitivity studies and comparative analysis are conducted to further demonstrate the merits of our proposal.