A hybrid multicriteria approach for performance evaluation: the case of a holding company

In today’s competitive business situation, performance evaluation of firms is an extremely important concern of all the people who are typically stakeholders of the business game. In case of holding companies, this is a more important issue since the parent firm must permanently control the situation of its subsidiaries in their sectors to make appropriate investment decisions. This paper develops a multicriteria decision making (MCDM) approach for evaluating performance of firms considering financial and productivity criteria.. We adopt Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) method to determine the relative importance of evaluation criteria, taking the vagueness and imprecision of human judgments into consideration. Then, we employ the Preference Ranking Organization METHod for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE) for ranking of firms. Afterward, this paper enjoys benefit of using Technique of Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to assess the validity of the obtained ranking results. Our approach was applied to a holding company listed in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) as a real case. The analysis of ranking results revealed advantages of combining these MCDM methods.