Consensus group decision making under model uncertainty with a view towards environmental policy making

Abstract

In this paper we propose a consensus group decision making scheme under model uncertainty consisting of an iterative two-stage procedure and based on the concept of Fr\'echet barycenter. Each step consists of two stages: the agents first update their position in the opinion metric space by a local barycenter characterized by the agents' immediate interactions and then a moderator makes a proposal in terms of a global barycenter, checking for consensus at each step. In cases of large heterogeneous groups the procedure can be complemented by an auxiliary initial homogenization step, consisting of a clustering procedure in opinion space, leading to large homogeneous groups for which the aforementioned procedure will be applied. The scheme is illustrated in examples motivated from environmental economics.