Consensus models at minimum quadratic cost and its economic interpretation

Reaching a consensus in a group decision-making (GDM) usually costs plenty of time and resources, so how to minimize the total cost in a GDM process has become the focus of most researchers, which makes the construction of the minimum cost consensus models be the key research field in recent years. The aim of this paper is to propose two kinds of non-linear minimum cost consensus models: one considers all the individual decision makers (DMs), while the other focuses only on a particular DM. To do this, consensus models based on minimum cost and maximum return are constructed. By using the dual theory in quadratic programming, the economic significance of these two models is verified and their relationship is further explored.