Product Selection Considering Multiple Consumers' Expectations and Online Reviews: A Method Based on Intuitionistic Fuzzy Soft Sets and TODIM

Large amounts of online reviews from e-commerce sites and social media platforms can help potential consumers to better understand products and play an important part in assisting potential consumers in making purchase decisions. Moreover, while multiple consumers purchase the same product, the index parameters of the product that are of concern among them are usually different, i.e., they have different expectations for the product. Therefore, the question of how to effectively analyze online product reviews and consider multiple consumers' expectations to select products is an important issue that needs to be addressed. The objective of this study is to propose a product selection method based on intuitionistic fuzzy soft sets and TODIM. Firstly, the online reviews are extracted by the web crawler and are pretreated. Next, the sentiment orientations of each online review concerning product index parameters are recognized using the dictionary-based sentiment analysis algorithm. Then, the evaluation values of sentiment orientations for product index parameters are firstly expressed by intuitionistic fuzzy numbers and are then transformed into intuitionistic fuzzy soft sets. Further, the alternative product set is obtained according to the uni-int decision function and multiple consumers' expectations, and we then rank the alternative products using the TODIM method. Finally, a case study is provided to illustrate the validity and feasibility of the proposed method.