Dear Malek Hassanpour , Dragan Pamučar

Reference is made to your paper

Evaluation of Iranian household appliance industries using MCDM models

My comments are:

According to the title you want to evaluate appliance industries. Regarding what? Performance, quality, reliability, etc.? I guess that what you want to do is consider the 25 industries as a cluster and find out how sustainable is their activity form the sustainability point of view, and thus, involving economics, environment and social.

If this is the case, I would say than companies should comply with standards regarding emissions, water consumption, energy, recycling, quality, circular economy, etc., that is, many more that the 7 criteria you are considering.

At the same time, it appears that you are addressing international quality as well as companies’ efficiency. I could understand the second but not the first, because I guess that you want top quality in both overseas and in Iran.

In using MCDM what is what you are looking? The most sustainable companies?

Sorry, but I find the text confusing.

1- In page 3 you say “The present study examined four decision-making systems”

My question is; What for? What do you gain in having 4 similar or dissimilar rankings?

What do you learn from them or what conclusions can you extract?

None.

2- In page 4 “To find the significant differences and correlations among 5 main criteria of industries”

Suppose that you find a high correlation between two methods. Does it mean that they are the best solution? Certainly not. There are hundreds of papers that use this comparison procedure, but none of them explain why. It appears that they use it because intuitively it may appear reasonable.

3- the validity of data is very obvious to depend on its initial source”

As long the source provides reliable data it can be considered valid, but it does not mean that the result is valid, because in most methods there is a lot of subjectivity and assumptions, that don’t have any mathematical and common-sense support, like using subjective weights.

In page 8 there is a mistake in formula 8 since the constant K (which is the ln of the number of activities), and used to determine an average, must have a negative sign.

Since the entropy of each criterion is negative to find the average, you need to use K negative, consequently, formulas 9 and 10 are erroneous.

Why formulas 6 and 7 are duplicated?

4- In page 18 “It was found a significant difference (p-value between weights in Table 2 (Ki values and weights of SAW model) using both t-test and pair test outputs”

What are the Ki values?

5- In page 22 “Table 9 shows the ranking values for the data of IHAI in ARAS, SAW, DEA and CODAS models. The reason to use the Entropy Shannon weighing system for the IHAI gets back to this fact that for future development and expansion withholding negative and positive criteria we need this system”

Sorry, I don’t understand what you are trying to say.

I hope these comments may help you

Nolberto Munier