Copyright © 2012 Chin-Yi Chen and Chung-Wei Li. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Making a decision implies that there are alternative choices to be considered, and a major challenge of decision-making is to identify the adequate criteria for program planning or problem evaluation. The decision-makers’ criteria consists of the characteristics or requirements each alternative must possess and the alternatives are rated on how well they possess each criterion. We often use criteria developed and used by different researchers and institutions, and these criteria have similar means and can be substituted for one another. Choosing from existing criteria offers a practical method to engineers hoping to derive a set of criteria for evaluating objects or programs. We have developed a hybrid model for extracting evaluation criteria which considers substitutions between the criteria. The model is developed based on Social Network Analysis and Maximum Mean De-Entropy algorithms. In this paper, the introduced methodology will also be applied to analyze the criteria for assessing brand equity as an application example. The proposed model demonstrates that it is useful in planning feasibility criteria and has applications in other evaluation-planning purposes.