Abstract:

We develop a new method for decision making in educational management when the environment is very uncertain and can be assessed with linguistic information. We use an approach that uses the probabilistic weighted averaging (PWA) operator. Thus, we are able to consider the subjective and the objective probability of the problem because the PWA unifies both concepts in the same formulation considering the degree of importance that each concept has in the aggregation. We introduce the linguistic PWA (LPWA) operator. It is an aggregation operator with similar characteristics than the PWA but for uncertain environments where it is not possible to use exact numbers but it is possible to use linguistic information. A key feature of the LPWA is that it considers a wide range of linguistic aggregation operators including the linguistic weighted average (LWA), the linguistic probabilistic aggregation (LPA), the linguistic arithmetic WA (LAWA), the linguistic arithmetic PA (LAPA) and the linguistic average (LA). We study some of its main properties. We develop and application in educational management concerning the selection of a new course to be given in a PhD course. We see that each particular type of LPWA operator may lead to different decisions. Thus, the decision-maker is able to consider a wide range of scenarios and select the one that it is in closest accordance to his interests.

Keywords:

Decision making, linguistic variable, probability, weighted average, educational management.