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臺大管理論叢
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Barla, 2003; Huang and Keskar, 2007). Thus, SMART should be deemed an appropriate
approach for supplier evaluation and selection in practice. Surprisingly, according to the
literature review of Ho, Xu, and Dey (2010), in spite of the advantages of SMART, very few
(or merely 2.5%) of the previous works in supplier selection adopted SMART.
Our proposed approach was also motivated by the recent trend of accounting for human
effects when modeling the process of supplier selection (Chai, Liu, and Ngai, 2013).
Scholars are becoming aware of the importance of human preference information (e.g.,
decision makers, domain experts, managers, and stakeholders); thus, they attempt to employ
multifarious techniques to depict supplier selection processes (e.g., Rieger, Wang, and Hens,
2014). For instance, preference relation is expected to become a popular tool for supplier
selection problems (Chai and Ngai, 2014). Meanwhile, scholars have started to explore
theoretical modeling beyond onefold, while exhibiting more concern with diverse
organizational or individual perspectives such as company strategies, stakeholder influence,
enterprise resource planning, and policy environments (Chai et al., 2013).
In this research, we attempt to explore the human effect of buyers’ risk-taking behavior
on their supplier selection decisions. This effect may be recognized in practice but has never
been addressed in the literature of purchasing and supply management (Ho et al., 2010;
Hoffmann, Schiele, and Krabbendam, 2013). Moreover, the effect of buyers’ risk-taking
behavior on their supplier selection decisions may be particularly impactful under different
scenarios of market demand, because in practice procurement managers with distinct risk-
taking behaviors tend to use different suppliers when market demand forecasts vary.
Nevertheless, most, if not all, of the previous works on supplier selection have not
considered different (external) market demand scenarios; suppliers’ attributes are the focus
(Chai et al., 2013; Ho et al., 2010). To close the gap between the practical considerations
(i.e., buyers’ risk-taking behavior and changes in market demand) and theoretical
development in the supplier selection problem, this research proposes the incorporation of
the utility function in the SMART and investigates supplier selection under different
scenarios of market demand.
Given a set of attributes and risk-taking behavior of a buyer (manufacturer), this
approach will facilitate buyer’s supplier evaluation and selection in making supply
portfolios. The proposed method considers that each decision-maker (buyer) has his or her
own preference and risk-taking behavior which will affect supplier selection. Using SMART
can reflect the preference of a buyer through the attributes provided, each of which may
consist of several criteria. Additionally, this research uses the utility theory to incorporate the