Are Stakeholders’ Opinions Redundant?

Abstract

Decision-making, bringing in the opinions of several stakeholders, may be a rather time- and resource-demanding process. Partial order-based methods like generalized linear aggregation (GLA) and average ranking appear as advantageous tools for considering several stakeholders’ opinions simultaneously. The present study presents an approach where stakeholders’ opinions/weights are substituted by a series of randomly generated weight regimes, leading to virtually identical rankings as demonstrated through comparisons to examples where true stakeholder opinions are applied, as demonstrated through a study on food sustainability. This study showed a high degree of agreement between the ranking based on random data and that based on real stakeholder data. The method, which is a top-down approach to the decision process, appears to be a highly resource-reducing decision-supporting process. However, the method, by default, excludes the possibility of incorporating specific knowledge from, e.g., employees or other stakeholders in the decision process.