A new approach to MACTOR considering interaction effects: An example from the telecommunications industry in Turkey

Abstract

<p>The MACTOR method aims to observe the relationships among actors and examine their positions on the key issues of the system under study. Despite being a widely used tool for keeping both the direct and indirect relationships among the actors and their attitudes towards key issues, the method fails to represent the interaction effects. To address this weakness, this study proposes two improvements to the classical MACTOR method. Firstly, the joint effects of actor pairs on others are integrated into the method using the Choquet integral with respect to 2-additive fuzzy measures to ensure that both the positioning map and power coefficients can reflect the power of actor pairs in convincing others to accomplish their own goals. Secondly, the joint positions of actor pairs on the key issues are considered using the Shapley value to include the marginal value that each actor attributes to the objectives. To the best knowledge of the author, this is the first study proposing a methodological improvement to MACTOR and the only one in the literature representing both the interactions among actors and their joint attitudes towards the objectives. The applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated by an example from the telecommunications industry in Turkey.</p>