A Fuzzy Multiple Level Multiple Criteria Decision Making Approach for Advertising Agency Selection Graduate Student: Eilinawati 研究生 : 謝有花 Advisor: Prof. Chu, Ta-Chung 指導教授 : 朱大中博士

Background and Motivation Nowadays in the global market, many companies face high levels of competition. How a company can capture a better opportunity to promote its products depends on whether it can effectively and efficiently advertise its new products; one of the important factors that have to be considered is selecting the advertising agency These are complex decision-making processes that have a capability that places the right agency in the right jobs at the right time. Choosing the best advertising agency is not that easy, so many criteria need to be evaluated. It is not just to talk about cost or the good reputation, but there are some of qualitative criteria which have to be considered and cannot be properly quantified. 2

Background and Motivation Besides, the criteria that should be considered may have different important weights in the perspective of different decision maker. There some criteria that have some sub-criteria whereas some sub- criteria might have another sub-criteria and so on. As a result, this study proposes fuzzy multiple levels multiple criteria decision making (MLMCDM) model that can be a very suitable approach for evaluation and selection of advertising agency. 3

Problem Identification Advertising agency selection is a complex decision making process, by the fact that some of the criteria are completely quantifiable and others completely subjective. Besides, criteria may be quantifiable but in different units, so that they cannot be conveniently compared. After that, each potential candidate also must be rated for each identified criteria. The advertising agency evaluation and selection are generally and theoretically introduced; but in many advertising agency research studies, most studies focused on advertising agency-client relationship, not the evaluation and selection the agency. 4

Problem Identification One of the researches that focused on evaluating and selecting the agency is the research of Yuksel et al. (2007). but they treat all of the criteria as quantitative criteria. Besides, the common approaches for this issue, which is statistic, are not really effective to deal with qualitative criteria and multi-criteria decision making problems. Statistics considering only exact crisp values, this method cannot well- support decision-making procedures for such evaluation problems (Ou et al., 2009). Therefore, fuzzy multiple level multiple criteria decision making (MLMCDM) can be a highly suitable approach for this issue. 5

Research Objectives The objectives of this study are: To analyze criteria for evaluating and selecting advertising agency. To provide Chi Square test in order to analyze the independent/dependent criteria. To establish a fuzzy multi-level multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) approach for evaluating and selecting advertising agency. To conduct a numerical example to show the computational procedure and the feasibility of the proposed model. 6

Research Framework 7