A multi-criteria group decision algorithm for policy analysis

Policy analysis involves many different social actors. For example, an energy policy involves the social actors of environment, human health and safety, economic welfare, social, political and culture needs. Multi-criteria group decision making approaches provide a framework to assemble various experts' evaluations for the various policy options and lead to a final judgment. In this paper we propose an algorithm that ranks m policy options for partitioned subsets of experts based on the n experts' evaluations for the policy options w.r.t. the l social actors. This algorithm contains three procedures. In the first we obtain an n x m evaluation matrix for the m policy options w.r.t. n experts based on their evaluation for the l social actors. In the second we artition the experts into several subsets such that each subset of experts has the minimal internal con icts w.r.t. the policy options. In the third we rank for each subset of experts the m policy options. In this algorithm we also consider the weight of each expert.