An Approach to Determining the Importance of Model Criteria in Certifying a City as Business-Friendly

One of the key problems in the application of multicriteria analysis methods is identifying the importance of the model criteria. The relevance and validity of the decisions are directly conditioned by the relevance of a given set of criteria used for evaluating alternatives, and the correct determination of the weights of these criteria. Several methodologies have been developed to calculate the importance of each criterion for a given problem. All methodologies are classified into two main groups: subjective and objective. In this paper, we present a new procedure to integrate two recognized methods for determining the weights of factors—the analytic hierarchy method as a subjective method and entropy as an objective method. We apply our methodology to a contemporary local economic problem in Serbia—the process of certifying cities and municipalities as favorable to business. We also discuss its implementation in a software tool on a local government website.