Analyzing barriers for adopting sustainable online consumption: A rough hierarchical DEMATEL method

Sustainable online consumption is attracting attention in both the academic and managerial communities. Identifying and analyzing the barriers of sustainable online consumption is critical to its successful implementation. However, the previous approaches often assume that the barriers are equally important in manipulating the interrelationships among barriers, and they need auxiliary information or pre-assumptions (e.g. preset fuzzy membership functions) in dealing with vague information, which will influence the accuracy of the barrier analysis results. To solve the problems, an integrated method based on improved DEMATEL, ISM and rough set theory is developed in this paper. The proposed method integrates the strength of improved DEMATEL approach in exploring cause-effect relationships considering the impact of barrier strength on the relationships, the advantage of ISM method in building the hierarchical structure of elements, and the merit of rough number in manipulating the vagueness without any auxiliary information or pre-assumptions. Finally, an application in a large e-commerce company is provided to show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.