Representing a new approach for implementing e-insurance using fuzzy DEMATEL

Abstract

During the past two decades, e-commerce has revolutionized many industries by providing easy access infrastructures for interested users who wish to place their orders via internet facilities. Insurance industry is one of the most important financial industries in the world. E-commerce has been attracting many in insurance industry and insurance industry has utilized e-commerce because of its own significance in economic growth and health of society. However, enhancing e-commerce into insurance firms may face serious barriers and it is important to detect and setup appropriate actions to remove them. In this paper, we present a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) technique based on DEMATEL with an adaptation of fuzzy logic to find important factors influencing implementation of e-commerce into insurance industry. The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire and distributes it among five important insurance experts. Findings indicate that "behavioral-cultural barriers" influence on structural and field barriers. "Problems resulted from obeying government complicated rules" in the group of structural barriers, "low capacity of accepting e-insurance" in field barriers group and "lack of sufficient support of insurance chief managers from e-insurance and relative tendency of insurance staffs to make the insurance affairs electronic" in behavioral-cultural barriers group have the most influence on other factors of group.