Consensus Building in Collaborative Decision Making

Developing consensus is crucial to effective collaborative decision making and is particularly difficult in cases involving disruptive technologies, a new technology that unexpectedly displaces an established technology. Collaborative decision making often involves multiple criteria. Multicriteria decision making (MCDM) techniques, such as the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and multiattribute utility theory (MUAT), rely on the accurate assignment of weights to the multiple measures of performance. Consensus weighting within MCDM can be difficult to achieve because of differences of opinion among experts and the presence of intangible, and often conflicting, measures of performance. The method presented in this paper can be used to develop a consensus weighting scheme within MCDM. This paper presents a statisticallybased method for consensus building and illustrates its use in the evaluation of a capital project involving the purchase of mammography equipment as disruptive technology in healthcare management. An AHP architecture is proposed to evaluate the best decision from the proposed