Dynamic Compromise Behavior Driven Bidirectional Feedback Mechanism for Group Consensus With Overlapping Communities in Social Network

Abstract

In social network group decision making (SN-GDM), overlapping communities are special community structures that can assist opinion interaction to reach group consensus. However, the specific mechanisms of how overlapping structures facilitate community interaction need to be further explored. In addition, the compromise behavior of decision makers (DMs) is conducive to group consensus, but it is usually fixed at the same value, and then it need further research the characteristic of the dynamics compromise limits. To this end, the overlapping community structures under DMs’ trust network is detected. Then, the effect of community overlap in social networks on community interaction is explored. Meanwhile, a limited compromise function is built based on prospect theory to describe the dynamic compromise behavior of communities. Hence, a dynamic compromise behavior driven bidirectional feedback mechanism with overlapping communities is proposed in the context of SN-GDM, and an illustrative example with comparative analysis is provided to testify the advantages of proposed method. It is proved that overlapping communities can improve the compromise willingness compared to nonoverlapping communities, indicating that overlapping communities can serve as a bridge to facilitate interaction, and the dynamic compromise behavior can more realistically describe the real behavior of DMs. In general terms, the proposed method provides a solution to the consensus reaching issue of SN-GDM from a new perspective. Specifically, it can be applied to real-life application scenarios, such as group recommendation to recommend acceptable solutions for social network group users.