Sustainable Car Lite Future for Singapore: An Integrated MCDM Game Theory Analysis

Chen Yaxin

Abstract

With the rise in the number of complex real-world problems, especially multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems, there is an increase in the need to have tools to assess the problems. There are many excellent tools out there to evaluate MCDM problems to help stakeholders or decision-makers to provide them better insights. This paper looks specifically into policy decision-making. Evaluation of policies is mainly done through evaluating the policies through a set of criteria such as effectiveness, relevance, impact, etc. While these are good indicators to assess policies, they are however one-sided. That means it looks into how well the policies can perform but very rarely they assess based on different stakeholders that are involved. Hence the purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology that helps to evaluate policies with multi-criteria and multi-stakeholder. The aim is to develop a tool that can help to evaluate many alternatives or policy measures.

The main advantage of the proposed methodology is improving existing evaluation tools that are over-simplified. The proposed methodology covers quite a substantial area of concern, such as considering interdependence between stakeholders, which is not considered for some of the work done before. Hopefully, the methodology will not only be useful for policy evaluation but also extended to other areas such as business decisions, etc.

The proposed methodology consists of five steps, four of the five steps address a specific area. The first three steps consider the individual analysis of the stakeholders and output individual weights for the alternatives considered. This helps stakeholders to have a quick analysis on which one is the best among all alternatives. The fourth step evaluates the efficiencies of the alternative and helps to suggest a set of alternatives that can be chosen together to maximize efficiency. The last step solves conflicts between stakeholders when they have a dissimilar preference for the alternatives.

The methodology is tested through a case study. Policies implemented by the Singapore Government previously and policies that are implemented recently are taken into evaluation. These policies are targeted at building a car-lite society in Singapore. The aim is to use the methodology to find out which of these policy measures is the best and to test if it's able to produce a similar package of policies that is the same as what the Government has proposed in the White Paper.

The methodology was able to assist stakeholders with decision-making. It also simulates real-world conditions such as putting interdependence relationships into consideration. It has effectively improved the evaluation process and can be expanded to even more complex problems with more stakeholders or even more alternatives.