Comments on “Multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) methods in economics: an overview”

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

Partner Selection and Job Shop Scheduling for Virtual Enterprises

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

New thinking of multi-objective programming with changeable space – in search of excellence

Multi-objective programming (MOP) is a branch of mathematical programming that has been widely used to deal with various practical problems. With the introduction of new technologies and business models, a paradigm shift in optimization problems is gradually taking place from fixed to flexible optimization. For example, many organizations use outsourcing or business process reengineering (BPR) to improve or upgrade their objective and technological coefficients to achieve better performance. Hence, traditional MOP models should be extended from the concept of fixed to changeable parameters, called changeable space, which includes decision space and objective space. In this paper, we propose three kinds of MOP model with changeable parameters to help decision-makers achieve the desired point (aspiration level), which is better than the ideal point

Privacy in resource allocation problems

Collaborative decision-making processes help parties optimize their operations, remain competitive in their markets, and improve their performances with environmental issues. However, those parties also want to keep their data private to meet their obligations regarding various regulations and not to disclose their strategic information to the competitors. In this thesis, we study collaborative capacity allocation among multiple parties and present that (near) optimal allocations can be realized while considering the parties' privacy concerns.We first attempt to solve the multi-party resource sharing problem by constructing a single model that is available to all parties. We propose an equivalent data-private model that meets the parties' data privacy requirements while ensuring optimal solutions for each party. We show that when the proposed model is solved, each party can only get its own optimal decisions and cannot observe others' solutions. We support our findings with a simulation study.The third and fourth chapters of this thesis focus on the problem from a different perspective in which we use a reformulation that can be used to distribute the problem among the involved parties. This decomposition lets us eliminate almost all the information-sharing requirements. In Chapter 3, together with the reformulated model, we benefit from a secure multi-party computation protocol that allows parties to disguise their shared information while attaining optimal allocation decisions. We conduct a simulation study on a planning problem and show our proposed algorithm in practice. We use the decomposition approach in Chapter 4 with a different privacy notion. We employ differential privacy as our privacy definition and design a differentially private algorithm for solving the multi-party resource sharing problem. Differential privacy brings in formal data privacy guarantees at the cost of deviating slightly from optimality. We provide bounds on this deviation and discuss the consequences of these theoretical results. We show the proposed algorithm on a planning problem and present insights about its efficiency.<br/

Partner selection in international joint ventures : factors for the selection of partners in IJVs

The growing trend for companies to focus on geographical diversification implies a decisional process of how to face the opening of new markets and how to make the entry. The International Joint Ventures (IJV) are one of the major form of market entry mode selected by companies for this internationalization process, connecting with a local partner and using his resources to achieve successful entry. The partner selection is a primary factor for achieving success in establishing a JV, since that the high degree of failure and termination of relationships between companies come from an inappropriate choice of partner with lack of a proper due diligence and potential relationship problems. For this reason we seek to understand the most important factors for the selection of a partner in an IJV, based on a case study conducted in Sá Machado SA firm especially in its process of internationalization for the Angolan market. The factors encountered in the study are in agreement with other studies subjugated to the same theme, which define the knowledge and market access as primary factors, as well as financial / logistical support and a strong operational network. Regarding the factors focused on the relationship with the partner: trust, commitment and congruent goals are the major points highlighted as important in creating an IJV and essential factors for the success of the relationship.A crescente tendência para o enfoque das empresas na diversificação geográfica implica um processo decisional de como encarar a abertura de novos mercados e a melhor forma de proceder a essa entrada. As Internacional Joint Ventures (IJV) são uma das principais formas de entrada selecionadas pelas empresas para esse processo de internacionalização, estabelecendo uma ligação com um parceiro local e angariado dessa forma recursos que permitam atingir uma entrada com êxito. A seleção do parceiro é um dos fatores primordiais para a obtenção de sucesso no estabelecimento de uma JV uma vez que, o elevado grau de insucesso e término das relações entre empresas provêm, não só mas também, de uma escolha desadequada do parceiro, da ausência de uma correta due dilligence e potenciais problemas de relacionamento. Por essa razão procuramos perceber quais os fatores mais importantes na seleção de um parceiro numa IJV partindo de um estudo de caso efetuado na Sá Machado S.A. e do seu processo de internacionalização para o mercado Angolano. Os fatores encontram-se em concordância com outros estudos subjugados ao mesmo tema, em que definem o conhecimento e acesso ao mercado como fatores primordiais, assim como, apoio financeiro/ logístico e uma forte network operacional. No que concerne ao fatores mais focados na relação com o parceiro a confiança, o comprometimento e a congruência de objetivos são os principais pontos apontados como importantes na criação de uma IJV e os fatores essenciais para o sucesso da relação com o parceiro

Exploring Consumers’ Adoption of Highly Technological Fashion Products: The Role of Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivational Factors

Purpose – This study seeks to develop and test a model of consumers' adoption of highly technological fashion products (HTFPs) through modifying the technology acceptance model (TAM). Design/methodology/approach – Using a convenience sampling method, students between 18 to 26 years old were chosen as the sample population from a mid-size southern university in the USA. The final sample consisted of 268 responses. Confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis were employed to answer all hypotheses using the structural equation model. Findings – Empirical results revealed that consumers' intentions to adopt an innovation (i.e. highly technological fashion product) are driven by the multi-dimensional nature of consumers' extrinsic (i.e. perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness) and intrinsic (i.e. perceived innovativeness and perceived fashionability) motivation. Additionally, these motivational dimensions contribute to consumers' utilitarian and hedonic attitudes toward using an innovation, which in turn affects their purchase intentions. Practical implications – Consumers' utilitarian and hedonic consumer attitudes may enable retailers and marketers to design effective advertising campaigns by helping them to determine whether the functional or sensational components of the product need to be emphasized. Furthermore, when developing a new product, marketers need to focus on product attributes that possess both functionality and hedonic benefits. Originality/value – This is the first known study to examine the underlying relationships between motivations, two-dimensional consumers' attitudes (utilitarian and hedonic), and purchase intentions in the consumer-related product context. The study has broadened the TAM by integrating extrinsic and intrinsic motivational variables into the model. It has also deepened the TAM by conceptualizing consumers' attitudes as comprising two distinct dimensions: utilitarian and hedonic

\u3ci\u3eThe Conference Proceedings of the 2003 Air Transport Research Society (ATRS) World Conference, Vol. 2\u3c/i\u3e

UNOAI Report 03-6https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/facultybooks/1122/thumbnail.jp