Title: A hypermarket site selection model using the grey multi-objective decision method

Authors: Wann-Yih Wu, Chuen-Jing Bai, Omprakash K. Gupta

Addresses: National Cheng Kung University, Department of Business Administration, Tainan, Taiwan, R.O.C. ' National Cheng Kung University, Department of Business Administration, Tainan, Taiwan, R.O.C. ' Prairie View A&M University, College of Business, P.O. Box 638, Prairie View, TX 77446, USA

Abstract: As the retailing market has become more and more competitive, the selection of an attractive location plays a critical role in the performance of retail outlets. Due to their huge investment and operation costs, potential locations must go through a series of careful evaluations before deciding on the final site. Previous studies on the evaluation of site selection have adopted the multiplicative competitive interaction (MCI) model to decide the most preferred locations. The MCI model has been critiqued as relying too much on the opinions of potential customers and might need to be offset by the opinions of marketing experts. This article presents an alternative evaluation procedure to help retailers, especially hypermarketers, make a location decision by using the grey multi-objective decision method. The methodology is applied to a leading marketer in Taiwan and the results indicate that this model provides a significantly different approach from the MCI model.

Keywords: grey multi-objective decision method; hypermarkets; location selection; site selection; multiplicative competitive interaction models; MCI models; preferred locations; retail outlets; Taiwan; location evaluation; site evaluation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLSM.2006.008218

International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2006 Vol.2 No.1, pp.68 - 77

Published online: 23 Nov 2005 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article