ABSTRACT
The recent pandemic has been the greatest catastrophic event in the last century that has left its irrevocable effect on the socio-economic and cultural environment. The current work presents a combined multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) framework of logarithmic percentage-change driven objective weighting (LOPCOW) and evaluation is based on distance from average solution (EDAS) method to enfold the early impact of COVID-19 on firm performance from fast moving consumer goods and consumer durables sectors in emerging market. Five aspects such as stock performance, dividend payout capability, sales and operational performance, financial stability and economic sustainability are considered for comparing 30 firms over seven consecutive financial years (FY 2013-14 to FY 2020-21). For aggregation of year wise rankings popular methods like Borda count and Copeland methods have been applied. A comparison of results of the LOPCOW-EDAS model with other MCDM methods has been made. It is noticed that the firms which held the overall top positions prior to COVID-19 suffer more afterward than the bottom performers. However, there has not been any major effect of COVID-19 on firms’ financial health and long-term growth prospect. The result shows significant reliability and stability as revealed by the comparative ranking and sensitivity analysis. The proposed framework shall enable the organizations for detailed performance analysis. Some of the policy and managerial implications are also discussed.
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the impact of COVID-19 on the performance of select equity linked savings scheme (ELSS) funds in India for two different time periods namely June 2019 (before COVID-19) and June 2021 (after COVID-19) using risk, return and market perception based criteria. We use a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework of level based weight assessment (LBWA) and measurement of alternatives and ranking according to compromise solution (MARCOS). We test the group harmony using Kendall's concordance coefficient. We find that the result is validated and shows stability in the sensitivity analysis. To the best of our knowledge, the present work is the first of its kind that assesses the impact of COVID-19 on asset management companies (AMC) of ELSS funds from multiple perspectives. We observe that AMCs are unable to maintain their performance and ranks which suggests a highly competitive and fragmented nature of India's growing ELSS funds.
ABSTRACT
Due to the high necessity of medical face masks and face shields during the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare centers dealing with infected patients have faced serious challenges due to the high consumption rate face masks and face shields. In this regard, the supply chain of healthcare centers should put all of their efforts into avoiding any shortages of masks and shields as these products are considered as primary ways to prevent the spread of the virus. Since, any shortages in these products would lead to irrecoverable and costly consequences in terms of the mortality rate of patients and medical staff. Therefore, healthcare centers should decide on best supplier to supply required products, considering technical, and sustainability measures. Dynamicity and uncertainty of the pandemic are other factors that add up to the complexity of the supplier selection problem. Therefore, this paper develops a novel decision-making approach using Measuring attractiveness through a categorical-based evaluation technique (MACBETH) and a new combinative distance-based assessment method to address the supplier selection problem during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to high uncertainty, vague and incomplete information for decision-making problems during the COVID-19 pandemic, the developed decision-making approach is implemented under fuzzy rough numbers as a superior uncertainty set of the traditional fuzzy set and rough numbers. Extensive sensitivity analysis tests are performed based on parameters of the decision-making approach, impacts of weight coefficients, and consistency of results in comparison to other MCDM methods. A real-life case study is investigated for a hospital in Istanbul, Turkey to show the applicability of the developed approach. Based on the results of MACBETH method, job creation and occupational health and safety systems are two top criteria. Results of the case study for five suppliers indicate that supplier (A1) is the best supplier with a distance score of 3.308.
ABSTRACT
The broad objective of the present study is to assess the levels of anxiety and depression of school students during the COVID-19 lockdown phase and their association with students' background, stress, concerns and social support. In this regard, the present study follows a novel two stage approach. In the first phase, an empirical survey was carried out, based on multivariate statistical analysis, wherein a group of 273 school students participated in the study voluntarily. In the second phase, a novel Picture Fuzzy FFA (PF-FFA) method was applied for understanding the dynamics of facilitating and prohibiting factors for three categories of focus groups (FG), formulated on the basis of attendance in online classes. Findings revealed a significant impact of anxiety and depression on mental health. Further, PF-FFA examinedthe impact of the driving forces that steered children to attend class as contrasted to the the impact of the restricting forces.
ABSTRACT
In this article, we aim to compare the socioeconomic development (SED) of the countries listed in G7 (representing developed nations) and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa?developing countries). Further, we intend to delve into the nexus between the SED of a country and its resilience to the current pandemic, COVID-19. The initial apprehension is that a country with better SED can show better resilience. To test this assumption, we consider seven socioeconomic indicators representing income, employment status, educational level, health condition, government expenditures in essential areas, like health, research and development, and gender equality and apply a compromise solution?based multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) framework. Next, we consider three parameters, namely infected cases (IC), recovery rate (RR), and death rate (DR), as explanatory proxy variables to indicate the resilience of the countries to COVID-19 spread. Finally, we examine the association between the SED and resilience of the countries. The results show that the SED of a country does not lead to better resilience to COVID-19.