A Linguistic Hierarchy Model with Self-Confidence Preference Relations and Its Application in Co-Regulation of Food Safety in China

Linguistic preference relations are widely used by decision makers to elicit their preferences over alternatives in the Group Decision Making (GDM) process. Recent studies have shown that self-confidence, as an important human psychological behavior, has an important influence on decision-making results. However, multiple self-confidence levels of decision makers are seldom considered in the linguistic preference relation. Meanwhile many real-word decision-making problems are analyzed in a hierarchical structure, in which a complicated problem can be divided into several easier comprehended sub-problems. Hence, this paper aims at designing a linguistic hierarchy model with self-confidence preference relation (LHM-SCPR) to discuss complex GDM problems in a hierarchical structure. In the SC-LPR, each element contains two components, the first one is the preference value between pairs of alternatives, and the second one that is defined on a linguistic term set represents decision maker’s self-confidence level associated to the first component. Meanwhile, a nonlinear programming model is proposed to derive individual preference vector from SC-LPR. Then, we apply LHM-SCPR in co-regulation of food safety to present the validity of this method, and find that improving the participation skills regarding co-regulation of food safety is the most pressing task. Finally, detailed comparative analysis and discussion are presented to verify the validity of the proposal.