Measuring Consensus in Group Decision-Making Problems Through an Inequality Measure

Abstract

Gini index, a measure of statistical dispersion intending to represent inequality within a group, used mainly in economics, becomes in this paper a tool to introduce a new index to measure the level of consensus in Group Decision Making problems. An empirical study reveals that the levels of consensus obtained by this index are similar to those derived through the use of a distance function when fuzzy preference relations are considered. The results obtained suggest that this new index can be satisfactorily used to measure the degree of consensus in this framework.