Journal of Economics and Management Volume 14, No. 2 August, 2018

Applying Linguistic Cognitive Map Method to Deal with Multiple Criteria Decision-making Problems

Chen-Tung Chen

Department of Information Management, National United University, Taiwan.

Wei-Zhan Hung

Department of Industrial Engineering and Enterprise Information, Tunghai University, Taiwan.

Hui-Ling Cheng

Department of Finance, Overseas Chinese University, Taiwan.

Abstract

In general, decision-makers must consider many influence factors when dealing with decision-making problems, and these factors will interact with each other. The fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) is an analysis tool that can illustrate the causal relationships among influence factors by a network structure. In addition, the opinions of experts are subjective and vague in the decision-making process. It is suitable for experts to use linguistic variables to express their opinions. Therefore, this paper presented a linguistic cognitive map decision method (LCMDM) by combining linguistic variables with a fuzzy cognitive map to deal with multiple criteria decision-making problems. Finally, a numerical example was implemented to illustrate the computational process of the proposed method. The conclusions and future research directions were discussed at the end of this paper.

Keywords： Linguistic Variables, Fuzzy Cognitive Map, Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM).

JEL Classifications：C00, C02, C18.

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