An acyclic outranking model to support group decision making within organizations

A model to support group decision making within the board of any organization to select an alternative from a short list is proposed using a pairwise relation: consensus relation. This relation avoids elementary cyclicity which is a general shortcoming of previous models and satisfies transitivity under special conditions (weak transitivity). This relation is represented by a triangle-free graph and has important implications for Public Choice Theory such as the special relevance of the 2/3 majority rule and for Multicriteria Decision Making (MCDM) to improve outranking models. The proposed model can be easily applied as shown by the example presented. The contributions obtained from this model do not only include the selection of the recommended alternative(s) but also very useful representations and measures of the level of cultural consensus and dissent of the board members which can be used to improve their composition and behavior. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.