Evaluating mobile services using integrated weighting approach and fuzzy VIKOR

Mobile services’ rapid evolution and development has meant that their evaluation has become a more and more pressing issue, and from both the practical and theoretical standpoints. The significant previous work in the field of multiple-criteria decision-making based evaluation of mobile services has some practical limitations that should be noted. First, there has been insufficient research that has utilized both objective and subjective weighting. Second, the investigations that have employed Vise Kriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR), a well known practical tool for use in multi-criteria decision making, did not consider the fuzzy environment. In order to fill these gaps in the literature, the present study developed fuzzy VIKOR for use with an integrated weighting approach that combines subjective and objective weighting to account for mobile services’ various characteristics and, thereby, evaluate their quality. For subjective weighting, Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) was employed for simple determination of the weighting and causal relationships. For objective weighting of evaluation criteria, Shannon entropy was utilized. This study has a unique contribution in that it reflects the special circumstances of the mobile service evaluation that have not been considered in the previous studies. Especially, in this study, not only the subjective weighting method but also the objective weighting method are used for more accurate importance weight of evaluation criteria. In the novelty aspect, this is the first study trying to utilize fuzzy VIKOR in concert with a novel combined subjective/objective weighting method in order to integrate objective decision-matrix-derived information with subjective decision-maker preferences. Additionally, a supplemental, empirical mobile-service-evaluation case study was conducted that enables researchers and practitioners to better understand the overall, practical evaluation process. Validation of the case study results by comparison with other, representative multiple-criteria decision-making methods verified the proposed method’s robustness.