Visualizing preferences on spheres for group decisions based on multiplicative preference relations

Decision makers' choices are often influenced by visual background information. One of the difficulties in group decision is that decision makers may bias their judgment in order to increase the possibility of a preferred result. Hence, the method used to provide visual aids in helping decision making teams both to observe the background context and to perceive outliers is an important issue to consider. This study proposes an extended Decision Ball model to visualize a group's decisions. By observing the Decision Balls, each decision maker can: see individual ranking as well as similarities between alternatives, identify the differences between individual judgments and the group's collective opinion, observe the clusters of alternatives as well as clusters of decision makers, and discover outliers. Thus, this method can help decision makers make a more objective judgment. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.