A new procedure proposal for multi-criteria decision making: Improved criteria weighting method, applications with crisp and fuzzy numbers

Multi-criteria decision-making methods are widely used in business decision-making processes. Regardless of the multi-criteria decision making problem, one of the most important issues in the decision-making process is to determine the weights of the criteria. Criterion weights can be determined by objective and subjective methods. However, besides the strengths of these methods, it has been observed that there are also weaknesses and some methods have controversial aspects. In this study, it is aimed to develop an improved subjective criterion weighting procedure by examining the methodologies of AHP, SWARA, BWM, PIPRECIA and FUCOM, which are subjective criterion weighting methods, and to give application examples with exact and fuzzy numbers within the framework of the newly proposed "Improved Criteria Weighting Method (ICWM)". In this context, the "Fuzzy Improved Criterion Weighting Method (ICWM-F)" methodology, which is an extended version of the method with fuzzy numbers, is also given within the scope of the study. The study also aims to demonstrate the reliability of ICWM and ICWM-F by providing comparative analyses. Looking at the analysis results, it is seen that ICWM and ICWM-F give similar results to these methods, which are found to be reliable in the literature, and the correlations between the weights found are very strong. In addition, it has been determined that ICWM and ICWM-F provide advantages in terms of the number of pairwise comparisons, consistency and practicality.