Mechanism for cooperative partner selection: Dual-factor theory perspective

Abstract With global competition and greater components outsourcing, partners play an important role in the supply chain. Previous research on partner selection from the perspective of partner ability has ignored cooperation factors. Ignoring the cooperation factor can lead to a higher chance of failure, even if the partners have a good track record of performance. For this reason, this paper seeks to study the mechanism on cooperative partner selection from a dual-factor theory perspective. We consider two levels: collaborative level and individual level, as well as their measurements. We propose a novel framework for solving the cooperative partner evaluation and selection problem. This framework applies the compatibility degree of the triangular fuzzy soft set (TFSS) to measure the collaborative level, and an extended TODIM based on TFSS to measure the dominance degree for the individual level. A simple example is used to illustrate the potential application of the proposed method. To highlight our method’s practicality and effectiveness, we compare against an established technique.