A linguistic partner evaluation model in tourism supply chain networks

摘要

The success rate of delivering services in tourism business depends on the successful collaboration with suitable supply chain partners. It makes partner evaluation process critically very important, yet there is currently no available unified evaluation framework in the existing research. Limited by the qualitative nature of evaluation criteria and the incompleteness of available information, the selection process has to deal with complexity on measuring subjective variables, and also uncertainty of imprecise judgments. This study aims at developing the partner evaluation model for tourism partner selection problem, by applying the Dempster-Shafer (D-S) theory of evidence and Satisfactory principle as alternative framework. The result shows that the proposed hybrid approach provides a consistent evaluation result. The contribution of our study depicts that the linguistic evaluation model can deal with not only the uncertain information assessments, but also the ambiguity of sources providing information, while maintaining the flexibility for managers in making their decisions using randomly linguistic preferences. A practical case study in Thai tourism industry is used to illuminate the applicability of the proposed technique.