Robust Strategic Weight Manipulation Model with an Application to Environmental Assessment

In the increasingly complex and uncertain decision-making circumstances, interest groups and individuals will deliberately set attributes weight to manipulate the expected ranking of alternatives in order to achieve their benefits. However, it is not easy to change the ranking of alternatives, a certain compensation cost should be paid by decision makers. In previous studies, most scholars only considered the existence of unit compensation cost but ignored the uncertainty of compensation cost, which increased the risk of decision-making. In order to address the research gap, we construct two kinds of uncertainty sets in this work to describe the uncertainty of unit compensation cost more accurately. In addition, a robust strategic weight manipulation model is proposed with the presence of unit compensation cost uncertainty based on the robust optimization method to reduce the risk of the model. Furthermore, the proposed robust optimization model is applied to a numerical simulation of environmental assessment. The results show the applicability of the proposed method. Through comparison analysis and sensitivity analysis, we state that the proposed robust model is more scientific and effective than original model. Finally, some interesting conclusions and future research directions are given.