Fuzzy preferences as a conventional tool in group decision making and a remedy for voting

In this section we will first discuss the very essence of group decision making and how fuzzy preferences can help alleviate some inherent difficulties and make models more realistic. Then, we will briefly present some tools to be used, notably how to deal with linguistically quantified statements, and with a linguistic quantifier driven aggregation. Decision making in real world usually proceeds under multiple criteria, decision makers, dynamics, etc. Here we consider group decision making, and voting, under some fuzzification of preferences. We assume a set of individuals who provide their testimonies assumed to be preferences over the set of alternatives. The problem is to find a solution, i.e. an alternative (or a set of alternatives) which is best acceptable by the group of individuals as a whole. Since its very beginning group decision making has been plagued by negative results, essentially boiling down to that no “rational” choice procedure satisfies all “natural”, or plausible, requirements; cf. the so-called Arrow’s impossibility theorem This general drawback applies to all possible choice procedures, so that attempts to develop new, more sophisticated choice procedures do not seem very promising, and more promising seems to be to modify some underlying assumptions . A notable research direction is here based on an individual and social fuzzy preference relation.