Consensus model of social network group decision-making based on trust relationship among experts and expert reliability

Due to people's increasing dependence on social networks, it is essential to develop a consensus model considering not only their own factors but also the interaction between people. Both external trust relationship among experts and the internal reliability of experts are important factors in decision-making. This paper focuses on improving the scientificity and effectiveness of decision-making and presents a consensus model combining trust relationship among experts and expert reliability in social network group decision-making (SN-GDM). A concept named matching degree is proposed to measure expert reliability. Meanwhile, linguistic information is applied to manage the imprecise and vague information. Matching degree is expressed by a 2-tuple linguistic model, and experts' preferences are measured by a probabilistic linguistic term set (PLTS). Subsequently, a hybrid weight is explored to weigh experts' importance in a group. Then a consensus measure is introduced and a feedback mechanism is developed to produce some personalized recommendations with higher group consensus. Finally, a comparative example is provided to prove the scientificity and effectiveness of the proposed consensus model.