A Multi-Criteria Group Decision-Making Method for Risk Assessment of Live-Streaming E-Commerce Platform

Abstract

Live-streaming e-commerce is the future development direction of the retail industry. When retailers choose a live-streaming e-commerce platform, they face the test of various risks of the platform, such as insecure control of capital flow, insufficient support of public domain traffic, etc. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate the risks of the platform to help retailers identify the platform with the lowest risk. Considering the complexity of the risks of live-streaming e-commerce platforms and the ambiguity of the decision-makers thinking, the current method for multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) method in a fuzzy environment rarely discusses the decision-makers weight for the criterion. This paper proposes interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy multi-criteria group decision-making based on the decision-makers’ professionalism to evaluate the platform’s risks. This method determines the decision-maker’s weight for the criterion based on the professionalism of the decision-maker and uses the technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) method to rank the alternative platforms. Finally, a risk assessment of the agricultural product live-streaming e-commerce platforms is used as a case study to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. This research will not only provide practical guidance for retailers to choose the live-streaming e-commerce platform with the lowest comprehensive risk but also provide ideas for the research of live-streaming e-commerce from the perspective of risk assessment.