Stopping Rules in Collective Expert Procedures

Abstract

Collective expert interrogation procedures are widely used for group decision-making. There are some forms of the procedures, but in any case an expert procedure is a continuing in time process of group work, and a choice of a moment of its termination is one of important questions of examination. In literature two rules are mainly considered. The first one, the consent rule, speaks that termination is conducted at the reaching of consensus or essential proximity of expert judgments. First, this rule was formulated in the Delphi method. The rule was very popular and for a long time have remained the single stopping rule. Later in a few works there was a criticism of procedures supposing the trend of individual experts’ judgments to yield to influence of authorities or “majority opinion”. These works pay attention to a danger of conformistic trends and “groupthink” when experts refuse in fact their judgments for the sake of unanimity of a group. As a reaction to this criticism the stabilization rule appeared. In accordance with the rule termination is conducted at an achieving a high or complete stabilization (unvariability in time) of experts’ judgments. First this rule appeared in [1], then in [2]. The problem connected with the stopping rule has not studied experimentally. The first effort in this direction devoted to rules of consent and stabilization is given in the work.