Abstract
Investments in the agricultural sector represented by innovations and new technologies strongly influence the economic growth in developing countries. In this context, purchasing decisions have become more relevant. Multiple-criteria decision-making techniques are well suited for decision-makers (DMs) who are considering the introduction of new technologies. In this paper, a multi-criteria model is built to help a Colombian agricultural research company make decisions on purchasing different laboratory equipment. A compensatory approach based on trade-offs is used to elicit the preferences of a group of DMs. The high number of answers and cognitive effort required from them during the elicitation process led to using an alternative approach based on partial information, called the FITradeoff (The Flexible and Interactive Tradeoff) method. It showed to be the best fit to solve the company’s purchasing problem and allowed its managers to make decisions that consider criteria other than price, taking account of the DMs’ conflicting viewpoints. The proposed model aimed at contributing to the articulation of the end-user knowledge in decision-making in order to ensure effective articulation of actors and strengthening of science, technology and innovation in agriculture.
Highlights
Investments in research and development related to the agricultural sector have led to the adoption of best practices and policies contributing to poverty reduction and increasing future food security (Andersen, 2015; Thornton et al, 2017). The outputs of such investments coupled with the timely adoption of new technologies that have contributed to major improvements made in agricultural productivity (FAO, 2017; Fuglie, 2018), thereby boosting agribusiness and economic growth in developing countries (Tan et al, 2006)
Since agricultural productivity depends critically on investments that lead to innovation (Cai et al, 2017), several agricultural research firms have been seeking to upgrade their competitiveness by applying technologies that strengthen their supply chain management, improve the market and services, and reduce costs (Adenle et al, 2017)
To overcome traditional trade-off procedure drawbacks, an alternative approach based on the FITradeoff method is proposed
Summary
Investments in research and development related to the agricultural sector have led to the adoption of best practices and policies contributing to poverty reduction and increasing future food security (Andersen, 2015; Thornton et al, 2017). To overcome traditional trade-off procedure drawbacks, an alternative approach based on the FITradeoff method (de Almeida et al, 2016) is proposed This method maintains the foundations of the traditional tradeoff procedure while making use of partial information as a means to lower the cognitive effort required from the DMs, and overall, needing less information and saving time (Fossile et al, 2019). Even this method allows choosing the best alternative and even to rank all the rest of them, as applied in the food industry (Frej et al, 2019).
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