Towards proper consumer choices - MCDM based product selection

Everyday situations each day more often require us to solve sometimes even complex decisional problems. Such conditions may include the problem of choice when purchasing services, products or devices. The ever-increasing assortment of products and services makes it more and more time-consuming for customers to choose the most suitable product for them. Following their intuition or considering only some selection criteria may result in an unsatisfactory choice. Decision making in multi-criteria selection problems needs the consideration of many factors, which are often conflicting.

For this purpose, more people reach for multi-criteria decision methods (MCDM). These methods provide an easy way of solving a given problem under certain circumstances. With the increasing popularity of those methods, more are developed each day. This paper presents an approach based on four MCDM methods applied to solve the problem of choosing the most favourable CPU model available on the market regarding price and performance, among other criteria. For this purpose, COMET, TOPSIS, VIKOR and PROMETHEE II methods were performed. Later, a comparative analysis of the rankings obtained using the applied methods was conducted. Rankings provided by used methods were compared using correlation coefficients. The research showed that choosing a specific method is relevant for the results and that real-life problems can be successfully solved using multi-criteria decision methods.

The obtained results confirm the suitability of MCDM methods as a decision support tool for consumers’ product selection. Applications based on MCDM allowing customers to perform multi-criteria analysis of a set of products could contribute to increased consumer satisfaction and growth of popularity and competitiveness of online stores providing them.