A Hybrid Multiple Criteria Decision-Making Technique to Evaluate Regional Intellectual Capital: Evidence from China

Abstract

With the dawn of economic globalization and the knowledge economy, intellectual capital has become the most important factor to determine economic growth. However, due to resource endowment, location conditions, policy differences, and other factors, provinces in China show sizeable differences in regional intellectual capital (RIC), which affects the coordinated development of the regional economy. Evaluating RIC is a typical multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. Therefore, this study employs a set of MCDM techniques to solve this problem. First, the Delphi method is used to determine the formal decision structure based on a systematic literature review. A novel hybrid method, namely, the Grey-based Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) and Analytic Network Process (ANP), i.e., GDANP, is employed to obtain the relative weight of each criterion. Finally, based on the data of 31 provinces in China, the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is used to evaluate the RIC. According to the questionnaires filled out by an expert panel, we establish an evaluation index of RIC with 21 criteria. Based on the results of empirical study, the level of RIC in different regions in China is quite different. Furthermore, the RIC ranking is largely consistent with the provincial gross domestic product (GDP) ranking, in line with the current status of development in the regions. Indeed, this paper shows that the proposed hybrid method can effectively measure the level of RIC.