Decisions, Operations, and Technology Management

We consider a decision problem where a group of individuals evaluates multi-attribute alternatives. We explore the minimal required agreements that are sufficient to specify the group utility function. A surprising result is that, under some conditions, a bilateral agreement among pairs of individuals on a single attribute is sufficient to derive the multi-attribute group utility. The bilateral agreement between a pair of individuals could be on the weight of an attribute, on an attribute evaluation function, or on willingness to pay. We investigate cases in which each individual's utility function is either additive or multiplicative. In the additive case, the group utility can be represented as the weighted sum of group attribute weights and group attribute evaluation functions. In the multiplicative case, the group utility takes a more complex form.