A framework to overcome hesitancy of decision-makers in E-Government web site evaluation

Abstract

Considering the undeniable role of websites in the success of interactions between citizens and governments, evaluating e-government web sites is a worthwhile topic. This research has developed a multi-attribute-decision-making technique rely on Step-Wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis and hesitant fuzzy weighted geometric Heronian mean decision-making methods, for evaluating e-government websites. Proposed framework overcome the limitations of previous investigations such as the possibility of aggregation of expert opinions using group decision-making and modeling the hesitancy of the experts (due to the incompleteness of their knowledge or their doubts in evaluating different aspects of the model) through hesitant fuzzy sets. The designed framework was used in Iran to evaluate e-government websites. In this regard, after a careful and systematic review of previous researches, a list of dimensions and evaluation criteria was presented in the form of a comprehensive model. Then, an expert-based process was proposed to localize the model according to the conditions of the case study. The results of the research show that the final rankings of the decision-making method used in the hesitant environment rarely changed for different operators. So as the experts have confirmed, the model used in this study has acceptable stability.