Fusion of preferences from different perspectives in a decision-making context

• Our decision-making model recursively fuses preferences from different perspectives.
• It is suitable for different organizational structures based on a DMU concept.
• Propagation and fusion of preferences enriches the information.
• Enriched information allows a decision maker to make a more informed decision.

Solving a decision-making problem about a brand-new product might include preferences from a high number of potential customers (e.g., followers of a company on social media) and managerial constraints (or preferences) given by corporate managers with regard to different aspects (i.e., economical, technical, environmental, etc.) over multiple criteria (e.g., weight, capacity, color, or usefulness of a product). These give us some new insights on fusing preferences given by persons having different perspectives (e.g., economical, technical, environmental, etc.), including decision-makers, and aimed to be suitable for different organizational structures (e.g., multilevel structures). Herein, a proper representation is needed to merge preferences from each perspective, enabling their propagation, throughout an organizational structure until the level in which a decision is made. This representation is presented as a decision-making unit (DMU), and is used as the primary component of our decision-making model. In this paper, we propose a novel decision-making model that recursively merges the preferred criteria from different DMUs using the logic scoring of preference (LSP) method. An illustrative example demonstrating the applicability of the proposed model, in the context of a new product design, is included in the paper.