On consensus models with utility preferences and limited budget

This paper mainly focuses on the consensus problem with utility preferences denoted by simple trapezoidal membership function. In group decision-making (GDM), for acquiring the best consensus opinion, not only the total cost required by achieving the consensus, but also the utility of all the decision-makers (DMs) should be considered. Ben-Arieh et al. propose a consensus model from the view of the minimized cost. Based on their models, a kind of optimization consensus model has been put forward under the constraints of limited budget and different kinds of utility, whose objective function aims to obtain the maximum utility level of the whole GDM process. From an economic point of view, results show that different utility preferences of all the individual DMs have impacts on the final optimal consensus opinion. Besides, the moderator has a dominant role in the development trends throughout the whole decision-making process to some extent. Numerical examples are given to deeply explain the proposed models.