The Effects of Group Diversity in Group Decision-Making Process in the Travel and Tourism Domain

Abstract

In this paper, we present the results of a user study focusing on the impact of group diversity on the group decision-making process, in the travel and tourism domain, when a group is faced with a task to select a destination that they would visit together. Firstly, motivated by previous research, we introduce several measures that capture diversity with respect to group members’ individual, explicit preferences. Next, we illustrate that group diversity in terms of preferences, in essence, has a negative effect on the group performance and the individual “well being”. The analysis was conducted upon two data sets, one containing information about 200 participants organized in 55 groups, and the second about 150 participants organized in 41 groups.