A decision support approach for group decision making under risk and uncertainty

Cost-benefit analysis has long been used in decision making about public health and security. Frequently, risk and uncertainty are involved, and benefit and cost are not evenly shared by all stakeholders in the activities where public welfare is concerned. The result of cost-benefit analysis may be controversial because it does not consider the conflict of interest among the stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a decision support approach that allows individual agents to make their own evaluations of benefit, cost and risk over available alternatives. Individual beliefs with respect to the alternatives will then be aggregated to form a group decision. This approach can also be used to integrate the cost benefit analysis into risk assessment. An application to this group decision making, considering the disposal of dead animals, is given.