An ESG Assessment Approach with Multi-Agent Preference Differences: Based on Fuzzy Reasoning and Group Decision-Making

Yihe Lu, Yinyun Yu () and Ting Qu
Additional contact information
Yihe Lu: School of Management, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China
Yinyun Yu: School of Economics and Management, Chongqing Jiaotong University, Chongqing 400074, China
Ting Qu: School of Intelligent Systems Science and Engineering, Jinan University, Zhuhai 519000, China

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 16, 1-17

Abstract: The adoption of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) to measure the green development, social responsibility, and public interest of companies is a commonly accepted theme and approach in the industry and academia at present. As ESG assessment is characterized by heterogeneity of subjects, complexity of contents, diversity of scales, and uncertainty of weights, it has led to the variability of ESG assessment results given by different assessment organizations in the same company, which has attracted a lot of criticism. This paper proposes a group decision-making method based on the preferences of multiple subjects to solve the problem of heterogeneity of subjects in ESG assessment. Specifically, for the given ESG evaluation data, the first step is to identify the preferences of subjects and structure the initial group matrix; secondly, the fuzzy inference system is employed to mine the hidden preference information; further, the initial group matrix is revised using the preference information; and finally, the TOPSIS method is applied to aggregate the information and obtain the final ESG score and ranking of each company. This study was tested using statistics from 30 companies released by Harvest Fund in May 2021, which verified the validity and advantages of the method proposed in this paper. The proposed method integrates the preferences of heterogeneous subjects and mines the possible hidden preference information, which increases the interpretation of the information contained in the original ESG data and facilitates the achievement of group consensus.

Keywords: ESG assessment; group decision making; preference differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/16/12235/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/16/12235/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:16:p:12235-:d:1214589

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().