Multicriteria Approach towards the Sustainable Selection of a Teahouse Location with Sensitivity Analysis

Abstract

The teahouse market has seen an expansion across various countries. In order to identify the most reasonable paths for development, the choice of location for the outlets needs to account for a number of conflicting criteria. Therefore, the multicriteria approach is required to effectively handle the location selection problem. In this paper, we develop a multicriteria framework for teahouse selection and apply it in the context of Lithuania. The indicator system is set up in order to capture the different aspects of the candidate locations. We also apply two multicriteria decision-making techniques (the evaluation based on distance from average solution (EDAS) method and the weighted aggregated sum product assessment with normalization (WASPAS-N) method) in order to ensure the robustness of the results. The weights of criteria were determined based on the expert survey. In addition, a Monte Carlo simulation was applied to check the sensitivity in changes of the criterion weights. The empirical application demonstrated validity of the proposed approach in choosing the optimal location of a teahouse.