Cooperative games for group decision making under undirected collaboration network with hesitant fuzzy preference relations

In group decision-making problems, trust relationships among experts often impact the evaluation information they provide for alternatives, and non-cooperative behaviors are common in the consensus adjustment process. In the existing literature, cooperative game as a powerful tool is not well applied to cope with non-cooperative behaviors of experts in terms of their adjustment willingness and adjustment cost. The objective of this paper is to propose a group decision-making method with hesitant fuzzy preference relations based on the cooperative game to address above issues comprehensively. To achieve this objective, the previous collaboration information of experts is applied to construct an undirected collaborative network, and trust weights of experts are determined according to the in-degree centrality of the undirected collaborative network. To determine the degree of consensus of experts, the integrated trust relationship and preference consistency level of experts are used as a referent standard for the collective preference. A cooperative game is introduced in the consensus adjustment process. Two factors, namely, experts' adjustment willingness and unit adjustment cost, are included in the profit function of the game. In addition, the effects of changes in adjustment willingness and adjustment cost on the degree of consensus, the iteration number of games and the ranking result of alternatives are analyzed. The effectiveness of the method is illustrated by an example regarding sustainable supply chain strategy selection. Comparisons with related methods are also presented. Results show that the proposed method can reflect trust relations and non-cooperative behaviors of experts, and improve the degree of group consensus.