Group decision-making models for venture capitalists: the PROMETHEE with hesitant fuzzy linguistic information

Abstract

Venture capitalists (VCs) have long been preoccupied by the issue of selecting a promising start-up firm, whereas, ranking the available start-up firms is an effective way to solve this issue. In this paper, the PROMETHEE is chosen to be the fundamental ranking method. Also, the hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set is a suitable tool to simulate VCs’ evaluation information. Additionally, as the deepening of social division of labor and specialization of individuals, group decision making is famous for improving decision-making quality. Moreover, in the decision-making process, VCs exhibit behavioral characteristics which is depicted well by prospect theory that VCs are risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses and rely on the transformed probability to make their decisions rather than unidimensional probability. Thus, a group prospect PROMETHEE with hesitant fuzzy linguistic information is constructed for VCs to make a better decision. Then, the proposed method is applied to rank start-up firms and the comparative analyses are made as well. It confirms that the group prospect PROMETHEE is better in describing the common behavioral characteristics of VCs and in enhancing the quality of evaluation. First published online 12 July 201