A two stage approach for off-price retailers selection

This research proposes a decision-making approach to help managers selecting the off-price retailers (discounters and clearance wholesalers) and to allocate the unsold inventory. The proposed approach is structured into three main steps. First, fuzzy analytic hierarchy process method is used to assign a global importance weight based on the firm's strategy regarding business risk and performance. Second, the calculated scores are used to select a short-list of off-price retailers. Third, the two-combined risk and performance scores for each off-price retailer from the short-list are then added to the total profit and other criteria to select the right ones and assign unsold inventory using multi-objective optimization. Results from a numerical example show the merit of the proposed approach in terms of effectiveness.