Title: Group binary decision making with multiple agents

Authors: Moula Cherikh, Kal Namit

Addresses: School of Business and Economics, Winston-Salem State University, Winston-Salem, NC 27110, USA. ' School of Business and Economics, Winston-Salem State University, Winston-Salem, NC 27110, USA

Abstract: Decision making and analysis are frequently considered from the perspective of a sole Decision Maker (DM). In practice, however, decision making is often conducted by a group of DMs. This paper presents a decision analysis problem involving multiple DMs or agents. A simple two-state two-action decision problem where N DMs receive individual information about the occurrence of the two states is considered. After reviewing their information, each DM recommends an action to adopt. The individual actions are then combined into a single final group action. Optimal decisions that maximise an expected payoff are sought. An analysis approach, alike statistical hypothesis testing and involving Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves is used to investigate the problem.

Keywords: group decision making; binary decision making; ROC; receiver operating characteristics; likelihood ratio; optimisation; multiple agents.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2009.021618

International Journal of Operational Research, 2009 Vol.4 No.1, pp.55 - 74

Published online: 30 Nov 2008 *

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