A Novel Integrated Subjective-Objective MCDM Model for Alternative Ranking in Order to Achieve Business Excellence and Sustainability

Achieving sustainability in constant development in every area in today’s modern business has become a challenge on the one hand, and an imperative on the other. If the aspect of business excellence achievement is also added to it, the complexity of the system increases significantly, and it is necessary to model a system considering several parameters and satisfying the multi-criteria function. This paper develops a novel integrated model that involves the application of a subjective-objective model in order to achieve business sustainability and excellence. The model consists of fuzzy PIPRECIA (fuzzy pivot pairwise relative criteria importance Assessment) as a subjective method, CRITIC (criteria importance through intercriteria correlation) and I-distance method as objective methods. The goal is to take the advantages of these approaches and allow for more accurate and balanced (symmetric) decision-making through their integration. The integrated subjective-objective model has been applied in a narrow geographical area to consider and evaluate banks as a significant factor in improving the social aspect of sustainability. An additional contribution of the paper is a critical overview of multi-criteria problems in which the levels of the hierarchical structure contain a different (asymmetric) number of elements. A specific example has also been used to prove that only a hierarchical structure with an equal number of lower-level elements provides precise weights of criteria in accordance with the preferences of decision-makers referring to subjective models. The results obtained are verified throughout the calculation of Spearman and Pearson correlation coefficients, and throughout a sensitivity analysis involving a dynamic reverse rank matrix.