Deriving the weights for aggregating judgments in a multi-group problem: an application to curriculum development in entrepreneurship

In group decisions, two issues need to be tackled: weighting opinions of different decision-makers and aggregating their evaluations. Many group aggregation techniques analyse these issues. These approaches can be correctly applied only if the weights assigned to all decision-makers are available. Unfortunately, there are situations where such weights are unavailable or incomplete, the negotiation required to better define them is not possible or decision-makers are unwilling to revise their judgments. These situations could pose a critical problem for the correct application of aggregation procedures. This problem is exaggerated if there are more than one group of decision-makers.

In this paper, we present a new algorithm based on the Frobenius norm that considers the choice of the weights in aggregating judgments in a non-negotiable multi-group problem. This approach facilitates the computation of several sets of weights simultaneously, showing the roles played by each decision-maker and by each group in defining the global priority. To illustrate the method, we apply it in designing a new curriculum in entrepreneurship based on an entrepreneurial learning approach informed by perceptions of three stakeholders: entrepreneurship educators, entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship students. Data is collected by pairwise comparison within the Analytic Hierarchy Process and is aggregated using our proposed approach.