Abstract
Customers strongly base their e-commerce decisions on the opinions of others by checking reviews and ratings provided by other users. These assessments are overall opinions about the product or service, and it is not possible to establish why they perceive it as good or bad. To understand this “why”, it is necessary an expert’s analysis concerning the relevant factors of the product or service. Frequently, these two visions are not coincident and the best product for experts may not be the best one for users. For this reason, trustworthy decision-making methods that integrate the mentioned views are highly desirable. This article proposes a multi-criteria decision analysis model based on the integration of users’ preferences and experts’ opinions. It combines the majority’s opinion and criteria synergy to provide a unified perspective in order to support consumers’ ranking-based decisions in social media environments. At the same time, the model supplies useful information for managers about strengths and weaknesses of their product or service according to users’ experience and experts’ judgment. The aggregation processes and synergy criteria are modeled in order to obtain an adequate consensus mechanism. Finally, in order to test the proposed model, several simulations using hotel valuations are performed.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. This work has been supported by the Project UTN4058 of National Technological University (Argentine) and the Fellowship for Short Term Postdoctoral Stays at University of Malaga – International Campus of Excellence Andalucía Tech (Spain, period 2016 – 2017).
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In order to check the proposed method the examples used in Section 4 can be found in the next URL. The package is distributed containing source code files, data samples and examples used in this manuscript. https://github.com/IntangiblesChair/majorityandcoalitions
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Communicated by V. Loia.
Appendix: Valuations used for experiments
Appendix: Valuations used for experiments
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Karanik, M., Bernal, R., Peláez, J.I. et al. Combining user preferences and expert opinions: a criteria synergy-based model for decision making on the Web. Soft Comput 23, 1357–1373 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-017-2863-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-017-2863-5