Measuring consensus in decision making: an application to maritime command and control

An important component of maritime command and control is the information that has value to Royal Navy commanders in making campaign decisions. Studies aimed at identifying information requirements generally do so in a wargame context with several test subjects assuming command roles. An important adjunct to this work then is the assessment of how closely the subjects agree that the proposed information set is indeed valuable. In this paper, we focus on assessing the degree to which the test subjects participating in a MoD sponsored maritime command and control study agreed to a proposed set of information elements deemed valuable to taking combat decisions. The methodology involves the simulation of naval combat. The participants (former Royal Navy Captains and Admirals) are asked to choose a course of action that best accomplishes a stated mission. Information is provided on request. Each pair of participants is characterized by its set of information requirements. The objectives are (1) to define an overall information set that minimizes disagreement among the participants in some way; and (2) to develop a metric that assesses the amount of disagreement among the participants. Two metrics are presented: a mean consensus and a median consensus.