Many decisions in private and public organizations are made by groups. The paper explores strategies that the sponsor of a proposal may employ to convince a qualified majority of group members to approve the proposal. Adopting a mechanism design approach to communication, it emphasizes the need to distill information selectively to key members of the group and to engineer persuasion cascades in...

Ontology development is time and money consuming as well as an error-prone process; the need for an embedded mechanism that evaluates quality and acceptance of the resultant collaborative ontology is apparent. Existing tools and methodologies lack consensus building mechanisms that must be employed in order for a team to cooperate and agree on the design and deployment process of a shared one. ...

Many decisions in private and public organizations are made by groups. The paper explores strategies that the sponsor of a proposal may employ to convince a qualified majority of group members to approve the proposal. Adopting a mechanism design approach to communication, it emphasizes the need to distill information selectively to key members of the group and to engineer persuasion cascades in...

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 multiattribu...

A MUL-tree is a generalization of a phylogenetic tree that allows the same leaf label to be used many times. Lott et al. [9,10] recently introduced the problem of inferring a so-called consensus MUL-tree from a set of conflicting MUL-trees and gave an exponential-time algorithm for a special greedy variant. Here, we study strict and majority rule consensus MUL-trees, and present the first ever ...

If a set of agents tries to reach an agreement, there will exist an Agreement Space that models the maximum valid space according to the individual constraints of each agent, regarding the terms of the agreement. Previous approaches to Agreement Spaces model them by means of a Counsellor Agent that will help to agents trying to obtain an agreement knowing all the possible terms in that agreemen...

When designing a software system it is beneficial to study and use architectural styles from literature, to ensure certain quality attributes. However, as the interpretation of literature may differ depending on the background and area of expertise of the person reading the literature, we suggest that structured discussions about different architecture candidates provides more valuable insight ...

This demonstration presents a real-time virtual reality (VR) system that has primarily been used as a tool for simulating and negotiating transportation-related designs. Visualization creation and presentation methods are briefly described. Case studies include applications to infrastructure, traffic, and environmental planning, as well as evacuation analysis. An emphasis is placed on using VR ...

Decision Support and Consensus Building for PLANiTS Developments in intelligent transportation systems simultaneously Present challenges and opportunities to urban transportation planning. The challenges to planning stem from the increased range and added complexity of the choices available to transportation planners. The implementation of IWS technologies, many of which have system-wide implic...

The article identifies strategizing as a core process of strategic management. It contends that strategizing should be more than strategic planning and therefore needs strategic thinking which is systems thinking foremost. Four streams of influence on strategic thinking are discussed based on insights from strategy research. Furthermore, the article concentrates on two aspects of strategizing: ...