• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.181-187
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• 2014

Dealing with uncertainty is always a challenging problem. Intuitionistic fuzzy sets was presented to manage situations in which experts have some membership and non-membership value to assess an alternative. Hesitant fuzzy sets was used to handle such situations in which experts hesitate between several possible membership values to assess an alternative. In this paper, the concept of intuitionistic hesitant fuzzy set is introduced to provide computational basis to manage the situations in which experts assess an alternative in possible membership values and non-membership values. Distance measure is defined between any two intuitionistic hesitant fuzzy elements. Fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution is developed for intuitionistic hesitant fuzzy set to solve multi-criteria decision making problem in group decision environment. An example is given to illustrate this technique.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.138-144
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• 2011

The design flexibility and robustness have become key factors to handle various sources of uncertainties at the early phase of design. Even though designers are uncertain about which single values to specify, they usually have a preference for certain values over others. In the first and second reports of a four-part paper, a set-based design approach has been proposed for achieving design flexibility and robustness while capturing designer's preference, and its effectiveness has been illustrated with a simple vehicle side-door impact beam design problem. This report presents the applicability of the proposed design approach to the large-scale multi-objective design optimization with a successful implementation of real vehicle side-door structure design.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.152-159
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of transaction characteristics on transaction cost and choice intention by applying transaction cost theory to experiential product. Experience-specificity, transaction uncertainty, and personal uncertainty are proposed to reflect the characteristics of experiential products, and the effects of these variables on transaction costs and transaction costs are assumed to have an influence on the choice intention. The results of this study are summarized as follows. First, experience-specificity(site, physical equipment, knowledge skill, temporal), transactional uncertainty(product-, process-), personal uncertainty (preference-, and situation-) have a significant positive effect on transaction cost. Second, transaction costs (search, comparison, examination, negotiation, payment, delivery) have a significant negative effect on the choice intention of the experiential product. The results of this study show that the increase of transaction costs can reduce the choice of experiential products and the strategic consideration of experience specificity, transaction uncertainty and individual uncertainty are required to reduce transaction costs. In addition, experiential products lacked access from a transactional and cost-based point of view, and this study contributes theoretically by compensating for the lack.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.12
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• pp.658-669
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• 2017

While online shopping has been increased expeditiously, a significant portion of purchasing intention has not been converted into actual purchasing behavior without delay in online space. This study investigates the factors causing a delay in online purchasing decision even after purchasing intention has been formed. It identifies the uncertainty variables (information, psychological, and preference uncertainties) related to consumer needs and the situational variables (time pressure and past purchase experience) surrounding the purchasing transaction. Furthermore, the need for cognitive closure is proposed to moderate the relationships between uncertainty/situational variables and the purchasing behavior. The results show that the uncertainties and situational factors significantly influence purchasing delay. Also, the need for cognitive closure indeed works as a moderator between the uncertainty variables and the purchasing behavior. Practical and academic implications of these findings are also discussed.

• Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology(JNFCWT)
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.47-58
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• 2019

The paper presents the results of a multi-criteria comparative evaluation of 12 feasible Russian nuclear energy deployment scenarios with thermal and fast reactors in a closed nuclear fuel cycle. The comparative evaluation was performed based on 6 performance indicators and 5 different MCDA methods (Simple Scoring Model, MAVT / MAUT, AHP, TOPSIS, PROMETHEE) in accordance with the recommendations elaborated by the IAEA/INPRO section. It is shown that the use of different MCDA methods to compare the nuclear energy deployment scenarios, despite some differences in the rankings, leads to well-coordinated and similar results. Taking into account the uncertainties in the weights within a multi-attribute model, it was possible to rank the scenarios in the absence of information regarding the relative importance of performance indicators and determine the preference probability for a certain nuclear energy deployment scenario. Based on the results of the uncertainty/sensitivity analysis and additional analysis of alternatives as well as the whole set of graphical and attribute data, it was possible to identify the most promising nuclear energy deployment scenario under the assumptions made.

• The Journal of Fisheries Business Administration
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.1-12
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• 2000

The experience of many countries strongly suggests that bad governments and institutions have been a serious, if not the most serious, obstacle to economic growth and industry-structural adjustments. All public sectors pursue a mix of both predatory and productive activities-bad governments emphasizing the former, while good governments finding a way of promoting the later. In fishery public policy studies, much confusion exists about the roles of policy illustration and prescription. In general fishery public sectors involve collective actions by numerous individuals under conditions of uncertainty, complexity, bounded rationality, and imperfect information structure. All collective fisheries action organizations consist of a center(e.g., government), which leads fishery group actions, and peripheral participants(e.g., fishermen), which are controlled by the government. A paradigm is developed that gives both theoretical and empirical meaning to the constitutional determination of fisheries political preference function or fishery public sector governance structures. Three relevant spaces are specified: policy instrument, results, and constitutional. The collective-choice rules of the constitutional space structure the tradeoff between public and special fishery interest groups. Fishery public sectors seeking sustainable reductions in wasteful rent-seeking fishing activities should select constitutional principles and institutional structures that tend to promote resource sustainability. In particular, the effects of internal and external events on fisheries may result in a greater or lesser concentration of interest group power. Thus, the structure of the fishereis political power must be assessed in any prescriptive evaluation of alternative fishery governance weights.

• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.147-164
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• 2008

When measuring the value of environmental attributes of housing, the conventional Hedonic Pricing Method assumes market equilibrium. Thus each attribute is believed to be implicitly valued based on the market price. The revealed preference is the basic logic in this approach. However, if the participants in the housing market are not perfectly informed or feel vagueness regarding the attributes of the housing, the conventional Hedonic Pricing Approach could not provide relevant value of the attribute in question. A Fuzzy Regression Method is suggested to handle with the lack of information or preference uncertainty problem m the Hedonic Pricing Approach. In this paper, our main concern IS given to the fuzziness effect on the airport noise in the metropolitan areas of South Korea.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.61-101
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• 2014

This study investigates when and how disagreements in online customer ratings prompt more favorable product evaluations. Among the three metrics of volume, valence, and variance that feature in the research on online customer ratings, volume and valence have exhibited consistently positive patterns in their effects on product sales or evaluations (e.g., Dellarocas, Zhang, and Awad 2007; Liu 2006). Ratings variance, or the degree of disagreement among reviewers, however, has shown rather mixed results, with some studies reporting positive effects on product sales (e.g., Clement, Proppe, and Rott 2007) while others finding negative effects on product evaluations (e.g., Zhu and Zhang 2010). This study aims to resolve these contradictory findings by introducing preference heterogeneity as a possible moderator and causal attribution as a mediator to account for the moderating effect. The main proposition of this study is that when preference heterogeneity is perceived as high, a disagreement in ratings is attributed more to reviewers' different preferences than to unreliable product quality, which in turn prompts better quality evaluations of a product. Because disagreements mostly result from differences in reviewers' tastes or the low reliability of a product's quality (Mizerski 1982; Sen and Lerman 2007), a greater level of attribution to reviewer tastes can mitigate the negative effect of disagreement on product evaluations. Specifically, if consumers infer that reviewers' heterogeneous preferences result in subjectively different experiences and thereby highly diverse ratings, they would not disregard the overall quality of a product. However, if consumers infer that reviewers' preferences are quite homogeneous and thus the low reliability of the product quality contributes to such disagreements, they would discount the overall product quality. Therefore, consumers would respond more favorably to disagreements in ratings when preference heterogeneity is perceived as high rather than low. This study furthermore extends this prediction to the various levels of average ratings. The heuristicsystematic processing model so far indicates that the engagement in effortful systematic processing occurs only when sufficient motivation is present (Hann et al. 2007; Maheswaran and Chaiken 1991; Martin and Davies 1998). One of the key factors affecting this motivation is the aspiration level of the decision maker. Only under conditions that meet or exceed his aspiration level does he tend to engage in systematic processing (Patzelt and Shepherd 2008; Stephanous and Sage 1987). Therefore, systematic causal attribution processing regarding ratings variance is likely more activated when the average rating is high enough to meet the aspiration level than when it is too low to meet it. Considering that the interaction between ratings variance and preference heterogeneity occurs through the mediation of causal attribution, this greater activation of causal attribution in high versus low average ratings would lead to more pronounced interaction between ratings variance and preference heterogeneity in high versus low average ratings. Overall, this study proposes that the interaction between ratings variance and preference heterogeneity is more pronounced when the average rating is high as compared to when it is low. Two laboratory studies lend support to these predictions. Study 1 reveals that participants exposed to a high-preference heterogeneity book title (i.e., a novel) attributed disagreement in ratings more to reviewers' tastes, and thereby more favorably evaluated books with such ratings, compared to those exposed to a low-preference heterogeneity title (i.e., an English listening practice book). Study 2 then extended these findings to the various levels of average ratings and found that this greater preference for disagreement options under high preference heterogeneity is more pronounced when the average rating is high compared to when it is low. This study makes an important theoretical contribution to the online customer ratings literature by showing that preference heterogeneity serves as a key moderator of the effect of ratings variance on product evaluations and that causal attribution acts as a mediator of this moderation effect. A more comprehensive picture of the interplay among ratings variance, preference heterogeneity, and average ratings is also provided by revealing that the interaction between ratings variance and preference heterogeneity varies as a function of the average rating. In addition, this work provides some significant managerial implications for marketers in terms of how they manage word of mouth. Because a lack of consensus creates some uncertainty and anxiety over the given information, consumers experience a psychological burden regarding their choice of a product when ratings show disagreement. The results of this study offer a way to address this problem. By explicitly clarifying that there are many more differences in tastes among reviewers than expected, marketers can allow consumers to speculate that differing tastes of reviewers rather than an uncertain or poor product quality contribute to such conflicts in ratings. Thus, when fierce disagreements are observed in the WOM arena, marketers are advised to communicate to consumers that diverse, rather than uniform, tastes govern reviews and evaluations of products.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.98-120
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• 2009

The purpose of this study is to elicit preference for drug listing decision criteria and to estimate the ICER threshold in South Korea using the discrete choice experiment (DCE) method. To collect the data, a DCE survey was administered to a subject sample either educated in the principle concepts of pharmacoeconomics or were decision makers within that field. Subjects chose between alternative drug profiles differing in four attributes: ICER, uncertainty, budget impact and severity of disease. The orthogonal and balanced designs were determined through computer algorithm to take the optimal set of drug profiles. The survey employed 15 hypothetical choice sets. A random effect probit model was used to analyze the relative importance of attributes and the probabilities of a recommendation response. Parameter estimates from the models indicated that three attributes (ICER, Impact, Severity of disease) influenced respondents' choice significantly(p${\pm}$0.001). In addition, each parameter displayed an expected sign. The Lower the ICER, the higher the probability of choosing that alternative. Respondents also preferred low levels of uncertainty and smaller impact on health service budget. They were also more likely to choose drugs for serious diseases rather than mild or moderate ones. Uncertainty however is not statistically significant. The ICER threshold, at which the probability of a recommendation was 0.5, was 29,000,000 KW/QALY in expert group and 46,500,000 KW/QALY in industry group. We also found that those in our sample were willing to accept high ICER to get medication for severe diseases. This study demonstrates that the cost-effectiveness, budget impact and severity of disease are the main reimbursement decision criteria in South Korea, and that DCE can be a useful tool in analyzing the decision making process where a variety of factors are considered and prioritized.

• Proceedings of the Korean Operations and Management Science Society Conference
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• 1999.04a
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• pp.426-426
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• 1999

;There are many sources of uncertainty in a typical production and inventory system. There is uncertainty as to how many items customers will demand during the next day, week, month, or year. There is uncertainty about delivery times of the product. Uncertainty exacts a toll from management in a variety of ways. A spurt in a demand or a delay in production may lead to stockouts, with the potential for lost revenue and customer dissatisfaction. Firms typically hold inventory to provide protection against uncertainty. A cushion of inventory on hand allows management to face unexpected demands or delays in delivery with a reduced chance of incurring a stockout. The proposed strategies are used for the design of a probabilistic inventory system. In the traditional approach to the design of an inventory system, the goal is to find the best setting of various inventory control policy parameters such as the re-order level, review period, order quantity, etc. which would minimize the total inventory cost. The goals of the analysis need to be defined, so that robustness becomes an important design criterion. Moreover, one has to conceptualize and identify appropriate noise variables. There are two main goals for the inventory policy design. One is to minimize the average inventory cost and the stockouts. The other is to the variability for the average inventory cost and the stockouts The total average inventory cost is the sum of three components: the ordering cost, the holding cost, and the shortage costs. The shortage costs include the cost of the lost sales, cost of loss of goodwill, cost of customer dissatisfaction, etc. The noise factors for this design problem are identified to be: the mean demand rate and the mean lead time. Both the demand and the lead time are assumed to be normal random variables. Thus robustness for this inventory system is interpreted as insensitivity of the average inventory cost and the stockout to uncontrollable fluctuations in the mean demand rate and mean lead time. To make this inventory system for robustness, the concept of utility theory will be used. Utility theory is an analytical method for making a decision concerning an action to take, given a set of multiple criteria upon which the decision is to be based. Utility theory is appropriate for design having different scale such as demand rate and lead time since utility theory represents different scale across decision making attributes with zero to one ranks, higher preference modeled with a higher rank. Using utility theory, three design strategies, such as distance strategy, response strategy, and priority-based strategy. for the robust inventory system will be developed.loped.