On the notion of influence in sensory analysis
Résumé
When a group of agents is faced with collective decisional tasks, the agents
may have to cooperate to establish which alternative appears to be a convenient con-
sensus. The influence an agent may have upon the other ones may change the collective
decision. Modelling of influence in a social network assumes that each player has an
initial inclination for one of the alternative that may be different from his final decision.
The point of departure of such studies is the concept of the Hoede-Bakker index, which
computes the overall decisional power of a player in a social network when the decision
is binary. We propose to extend the notions of decision power and influence indices
when the decision is not simply binary, but associated with a scale of success: an indi-
vidual can more or less adhere to the collective decision. Initially, the idea was moti-
vated by the collective evaluation process in sensory analysis. Indeed, sensory analysis
is a set of methods for measuring sensory perceptions. When the panel is made up of
trained individuals who master the vocabulary of the domain, sensory analysis has been
the subject of numerous evaluation protocols. On the other hand, when the evaluators
are inexperienced evaluators not mastering the descriptors, the sensory characterization
may strongly be impacted by influential panelists. In this paper, we are interested in
measuring such a qualitative influence. Framing our work in game theory models, we
propose to extend the notion of influence index to the qualitative process of graded
decision in sensory analysis, justifying our choices on the basis of our feedback on the
process of sensory analysis by a collective of panelists.
Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
---|