Comments on “Multiple Criteria Decision Making (Mcdm) Methods in Economics: An Overview”

Abstract

This paper offers comments on a previously published paper, titled “Multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) methods in economics: an overview,” by Zavadskas and Turskis (2011). The paper's authors made great efforts to summarize MCDM methods but may have failed to consider several important new concepts and trends in the MCDM field for solving actual problems. First, the traditional model assumes the criteria are independently and hierarchically structured; however, in reality, problems are often characterized by interdependent criteria and dimensions and may even exhibit feedback-like effects. Second, relatively good solutions from the existing alternatives are replaced by aspiration levels to fit today's competitive markets. Third, the emphasis in the field has shifted from ranking and selection when determining the most preferable approaches to performance improvement of existing methods. Fourth, information fusion techniques, including the fuzzy integral method, have been developed to aggregate the performances. Finally, the original fixed resources in multi-objective programming are divided such that both decision and objective spaces are changeable. In this paper, we add new concepts and provide comments that could be thought of as an attempt to complete the original paper.

Multi-Criteria Decision Making in Civil Engineering: Part I – A State-of-the-Art Survey

“…The evolution of MCDM in 1975-2015 was discussed in a number of review articles: Wiecek et al (2008), Zavadskas et al (2008Zavadskas et al ( , 2014, Kapliński (2009aKapliński ( , 2009b, Zavadskas, Turskis (2011), Liou, Tzeng (2012, Tamošaitienė, Kapliński (2013), Liou (2013), Gay, Sinha (2013), Kaplinski et al (2014aKaplinski et al ( , 2014b, Kabir et al (2013), Masri (2014), Mardani et al (2015aMardani et al ( , 2015bMardani et al ( , 2015c.…”

New Hybrid Multiple Attribute Decision-Making Model for Improving Competence Sets: Enhancing a Company’s Core Competitiveness

“…MODM is typically applied in the areas of design and planning, and generally involves attempting to achieve optimal goals by considering various interactions within given constraints, such that both the decision space and objective space are changeable in new research concepts [47][48][49][50]. The present study focused on MADM; because traditional MADM ignores some critical concepts and requires some assumptions to solve actual problems (limitations and defects such as independence among criteria, probability distribution, and linearity), this study proposed a new hybrid MADM model to reduce the number of required assumptions [51] for evaluating how "competence set expansion" can be implemented in such a manner that it avoids "unrealistic assumptions in statistics and economics" [52][53][54]. The DEMATEL technique was used to construct an INRM (Section 3.1) and determine the influential weights through a DANP, which is based on the ANP (Section 3.2) [21].…”

Improving China’s Regional Financial Center Modernization Development Using a New Hybrid Madm Model

“…Therefore, in order to fill the gap in literature for improving financial center modernization, and to promote the effectiveness and validity, this paper considers all related variables of the factors of regional financial center modernization development, as based on the empirical case of Guangzhou in China. This research focuses on the methods required to improve regional financial center modernization, thereby, stimulating regional economic development, and considering the existing/occurring inter-relationship problems among multiple criteria/ attributes for decision-making in realistic situations (Tzeng, Huang 2011, 2013Liou, Tzeng 2012;Peng, Tzeng 2013). In recent years, several important new concepts and trends of the hybrid MADM (multiple attribute decision making) model for solving actual problems are considered.…”

“…First, the traditional MADM methods assumes the criteria/attributes are independently, linearly, and hierarchically structured; however, in reality, problems are often characterized by interdependent criteria/attributes, and may even show feedback-like effects for avoiding "some statistics and economics are unrealistic in the real world", such as, assumptions/hypotheses, etc. ; second, relatively good solutions according to the max-min concept of existing alternatives are replaced by "aspiration levels" to satisfy contemporary social needs, and avoiding "picking the best apple among a barrel of rotten apples" (Simon incorporated the basic concept of the "aspiration level" in his work, and received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978); third, emphasis in the field has shifted from ranking/selection when determining the most preferable approaches to performance improvement of existing methods by systematics, as "we need a systematic approach to problem-solving; instead of addressing the systems of the problem, we need to identify the sources of the problem" for avoiding "stop-gap piecemeal" (Liou, Tzeng 2012;Liou 2013;Peng, Tzeng 2013). Thus, this paper seeks a hybrid multiple attribute decision-making (MADM) model combining the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) technique to construct a total influence-relation matrix by dimensions and criteria for constructing an influential network relation map (INRM) to solve real-world problems using natural language to identify the degree of effects from the different dimensions/criteria.…”