Combining grey relation and TOPSIS concepts for selecting an expatriate host country

As international corporate activities increase, their staffing involves more strategic concerns. However, foreign assignments have many differences, and dissatisfaction with the host country is a known cause of expatriate failure. From the point of view of an expatriate candidate, the decision of whether to take an expatriate assignment can be regarded as a FMCDM (fuzzy multiple criteria decision making) problem. This paper describes a fuzzy AHP (fuzzy analytic hierarchy process) to determine the weighting of subjective judgments. Using the Sugeno integral for X-fuzzy measure, and using the nonadditive fuzzy integral technique to evaluate the synthetic utility values of the alternatives and the fuzzy weights, then the best host country alternative can be derived with the grey relation model. The authors further combine the grey relation model based on the concepts of TOPSIS (technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution) to evaluate and select the best alternative. A real case of expatriate assignment decision-making was used to demonstrate that the grey relation model combined with the ideas of TOPSIS results in a satisfactory and effective evaluation. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.