Integrating databases and preference evaluations in group decision support. A feedback-oriented approach

The paper introduces a new concept for group decision support that explicitly incorporates feedbacks from the group level to the individual decision processes. We first show that the representation of such feedback processes requires additional concepts beyond individual database views for group members. We then develop two basic techniques for incorporating group opinions into the individual decision process: explicit and implicit feedback. We show that explicit feedback also solves the database-related problems identified before while implicit feedback more closely corresponds to practical group processes. Therefore, a unified approach combining both techniques is developed. Application of these feedback concepts to a utility-based decision framework leads to a formal model, which is analyzed and illustrated by numerical example.