Fuzzy linguistic decision to provide alternatives to market mechanism strategies

  • Authors:

  • Ling-Zhong Lin;Huery-Ren Yeh

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Marketing Management, Shih Chien University, Kaohsiung Campus, Taiwan;Department of Marketing Management, Shih Chien University, Kaohsiung Campus, Taiwan

  • Venue:
  • Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

To understand how consumers select the market mechanism bundle strategies in different purchase routes, this paper develops three decision-making criteria: quality, risk, and reliability. With five different market mechanism strategies (bundled money back, unbundled money back, guarantee, information transmission, and promotion propaganda), this paper also builds up a hierarchy process for reducing consumers' purchase uncertainty. Besides, we investigate consumer's fuzzy cognition with three evaluation criteria in different trips of store shopping (large combination stores or specialty stores) and evaluate the relationship between each market mechanism bundle strategy and the evaluation criteria through fuzzy evaluation matrix. Finally, fuzzy weights are designed to obtain the subjective linguistic evaluations among consumers. This will help the consumers to select the optimum market mechanism bundle strategies and to avoid the ambiguous terms and vague situations. The empirical result shows in the large combination store ''bundled money back, promotion propaganda, and guarantee'' are the best market mechanism bundle strategies for reducing consumers' purchase uncertainty. In the specialty store, the heavily weighted market mechanism bundle strategies are the ''unbundled money back, information transmission, and guarantee.''