Distance-based consensus methods: a goal programming approach

Several authors have proposed a social choice function based upon distance-consensus between different committee rankings. Under this framework, the total absolute disagreement between committees is minimised. The purpose of this paper is to formulate the underlying optimisation problem as a goal programming (GP) model. To do this, the following three GP formulations are proposed: (a) a linear weighting GP model, where consensus is established by the minimisation of the weighted aggregated disagreement, (b) a MINMAX GP model, where the consensus is defined as the minimisation of the maximum disagreement and (c) an extended GP model, which subsumes the two previous formulations as particular cases.