A stochastic dominance based approach to consumer-oriented Kansei evaluation with multiple priorities

Abstract

Nowadays, with the increasing of aesthetic products, it becomes more and more important and quite difficult for consumers to choose their preferred products, especially the ones whose artistic and aesthetic aspects play a crucial role in consumer purchase decisions. Taking Kansei as one quality aspect of products, consumer-oriented Kansei evaluation focuses on evaluation of existing commercial products based on consumers’ Kansei preferences. This paper proposes a stochastic dominance based approach to consumer-oriented Kansei evaluation with multiple priorities. Particularly, given a consumer’s preferences, the concept of stochastic dominance is used to build an evaluation function for each Kansei attribute. Then, the importance weights captured by a priority hierarchy of Kansei attributes, together with the fuzzy majority, are incorporated into the aggregation of individual stochastic dominance degrees into an overall one. An application to the hand-painted Kutani cups in Ishikawa, Japan, is conducted to illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach. It is seen that the proposed approach outperforms the existing research in terms of easy of use and better decision-support to the consumers.