The weighted OWA operator

One of the properties that the OWA operator satisfies is commutativity. This condition, that is not satisfied by the weighted mean, stands for equal reliability of all the information sources that supply the data. In this article we define a new combination function, the WOWA (Weighted OWA), that combines the advantages of the OWA operator and the ones of the weighted mean. We study some of its properties and show how it can be extended to deal with linguistic labels. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.