Entropy Based Approach to Measuring Consensus in Group Decision-Making Problems

Entropy is a measure of randomness in a given set of data. An entropy measure could be appropriately used to assess consensus across a set of opinions. A Theil-based index is introduced in this paper to obtain the level of consensus in some problems of Group Decision Making. A comparative analysis reveals that the levels of consensus derived from this index are relatively similar to those obtained by using distance functions when a fuzzy preference relations frame is considered. This behavior suggests that this could be a useful tool in the aforementioned context.