Electre Method for Supermarket Selection Under Imperfect Information

Abstract

Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is a process used to choose the best alternative among several ones based on the criteria as well as ranking some alternatives. MCDM methods are used in many different areas such as energy, environment, construction and project management, marketing, mathematics, economy, computer technology and more. There are many MCDM techniques which are applied to different decision making problems. Some of them are Electre, AHP, Topsis and Vikor. Electre is one of the famous MCDM methods and this method provides a determination both best and the worst alternatives with respect to multi criteria by ranking them. This method has a significant advantage as it accepts cases of incompatibility with qualitative and immeasurable criteria. Since the weights of criteria and the values of alternatives are consisting of individual perceives, the problem can be mentioned as a decision-making process under imperfect or uncertainty environment. In addition, synthetic weighting, including subjective and objective weights, is applied to determine the concepts of concordance and discordance. The aim of this paper is to apply Electre method in marketing area. Three supermarkets are evaluated according to four criteria which are price, quality of products, product variety and customer satisfaction. As a result, the best supermarket is selected, and a ranking is made for these three markets. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.