Multi-criteria evaluation of financial statement quality based on hesitant fuzzy judgments with assessing attitude

Abstract

This paper aims to evaluate financial statement quality (FSQ) using a multi-criteria group evaluation method, which concurrently considers the quantitative examinations and qualitative opinions of the evaluators. Firstly, to describe the influence of cognitive styles on FSQ evaluation, we propose a quantitative hesitant fuzzy judgment description with an embedded assessing attitude. Next, an evaluation index system is established by combining the fundamental qualitative characteristics and the enhancing qualitative characteristics of useful financial information. Then, to overcome the weighting difficulties and achieve maximum consensus, this paper applies a distance-based method to determine the evaluators’ weights and a weighted averaging operator to compute the criteria weights. After that, a TOPSIS-based aggregation method is applied to aggregate all ratings. Finally, a practical example of an economic group’s FSQ evaluation is provided, and then this method is compared with other current methods to demonstrate its flexibility further.

Keywords:

• Multi-criteria decision making
• group decision making
• financial statement quality
• hesitant fuzzy
• assessing attitude
• weight determination

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71601134]; the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [grant number 2017M612983]; the Research Center for Systems Science & Enterprise Development [grant number Xq15C01].