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Evaluation of startup companies using multicriteria decision making based on hesitant fuzzy linguistic information envelopment analysis models
Author(s) -
Lin Mingwei,
Chen Zheyu,
Chen Riqing,
Fujita Hamido
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
international journal of intelligent systems
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.291
H-Index - 87
eISSN - 1098-111X
pISSN - 0884-8173
DOI - 10.1002/int.22379
Subject(s) - multiple criteria decision analysis , computer science , data envelopment analysis , fuzzy logic , robustness (evolution) , artificial intelligence , operations research , management science , machine learning , data mining , mathematics , mathematical optimization , engineering , biochemistry , chemistry , gene
Evaluating startup companies is an important management process for technology business incubators and it is also a typical multicriteria decision‐making (MCDM) problem. There exist various methods that have proposed to solve MCDM problems, but these methods heavily depend on the exact criteria weight values. The decision results of these methods are unstable. Moreover, they cannot provide the improvement suggestions for the nonoptimal startup companies. To overcome these two drawbacks, we propose a novel hesitant fuzzy linguistic decision‐making method to solve the problem of evaluating startup companies. To this end, a novel semantic comparison method based on the experts' psychology and the ratio of score value to deviation degree is proposed to compare the hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets. Then, a novel definition of hesitant fuzzy linguistic information envelopment efficiency (HFLIEE) is proposed, based on which, a novel hesitant fuzzy linguistic information envelopment analysis (HFLIEA) model and a novel preference model are proposed. By solving these models, all the alternatives can be ranked and nonoptimal alternatives can be improved. Finally, the numerical analysis is given to illustrate the applicability of the proposed models and the robustness analyses of the proposed models are provided. At the same time, they are compared with the previous hesitant fuzzy linguistic decision‐making methods.