Distance-based consensus methods:: a goal programming approach

Several authors have proposed a social choice function based upon distance-consensus between different committee rankings. Under this framework, the total absolute disagreement between committees is minimised. The purpose of this paper is to formulate the underlying optimisation problem as a goal programming (GP) model. To do this, the following three GP formulations are proposed: (a) a linear weighting GP model, where consensus is established by the minimisation of the weighted aggregated disagreement, (b) a MINMAX GP model, where the consensus is defined as the minimisation of the maximum disagreement and (c) an extended GP model, which subsumes the two previous formulations as particular cases. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.