The negotiable alternatives identifier for group negotiation support

It has been observed that in single voting unanimity can rarely be reached. In many situations, however, members may not be aware that their preferences as expressed by their votes may contain room for compromise. This paper proposes a consensus-seeking methodology ± the Negotiable Alternatives Identi®er (NAI) ± that searches for such a compromise. Starting with individual cardinal preferences on alternatives, NAI classi®es alternatives into three classes of preferences: the most preferred, the less preferred and the least preferred. Within each class, relatively small di€erences in preferences among alternatives may make it reasonable for a decision maker to consider them interchangeable. As a result of this ̄exibility, a collective solution acceptable to all decision makers can be generated. In this paper we provide some theorems and their proofs to address the extreme conditions of the proposed heuristic. Also we provide an example to illustrate how to use the proposed heuristic to solve a real-world problem. Ó 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.