Modelling influence in group decision making

Group decision making has been widely studied since group decision making processes are very common in many fields. Formal representation of the experts’ opinions, aggregation of assessments or selection of the best alternatives has been some of main areas addressed by scientists and researchers. In this paper, we focus on another promising area, the study of group decision making processes from the concept of influence and social networks. In order to do so, we present a novel model that gathers the experts’ initial opinions and provides a framework to represent the influence of a given expert over the other(s). With this proposal it is feasible to estimate both the evolution of the group decision making process and the final solution before carrying out the group discussion process and consequently foreseeing possible actions.