Allowing agents to be imprecise: A proposal using multiple linguistic terms

In this paper we propose a decision-making procedure where the agents judge the alternatives through linguistic terms such as ‘very good’, ‘good’, ‘acceptable’, etc. If the agents are not confident about their opinions, they can use a linguistic expression formed by several consecutive linguistic terms. To obtain a ranking on the set of alternatives, the method consists of three different stages. The first stage looks for the alternatives in which the overall opinion is closer to the ideal assessment. The overall opinion is developed by a distance-based process among the individual assessments. The next two stages form a tie-breaking process. Firstly by using a dispersion index based on the Gini coefficient, and secondly by taking into account the number of best-assessments. The main characteristics of the proposed decision-making procedure are analyzed.