A Trust Incentive Driven Feedback Mechanism With Risk Attitude for Group Consensus in Social Networks

Trust relationships can facilitate cooperation in collective decisions. Using behavioral incentives via trust to encourage voluntary preference adjustments improves consensus through mutual agreement. This article aims to establish a trust incentive-driven framework for enabling consensus in social network group decision making (SN-GDM). First, a trust incentive mechanism is modeled via interactive trust functions that integrate risk attitude. The inclusion of risk attitude is crucial as it reflects the diverse ways decision makers (DMs) respond to uncertainty in trusting others’ judgments, capturing the varied behaviors of risky, neutral, and insurance DMs in the consensus process. Inconsistent DMs then adjust opinions in exchange for heightened trust. This mechanism enhances the importance degrees via a new weight assignment method, serving as a reward to motivate DMs to further align with the majority. Subsequently, a trust incentive-driven bounded maximum consensus model is proposed to optimize cooperation dynamics while preventing over-compensation of adjustments. Simulations and comparative analysis demonstrate the model’s efficacy in facilitating cooperation through tailored trust incentive mechanisms that account for these diverse risk preferences. Finally, the approach is applied to evaluate candidates for the Norden Shipping Scholarship, providing a cooperation-focused SN-GDM framework for achieving mutually agreeable solutions while acknowledging the impact of individual risk attitude on trust-based interactions.