Determining the financial performance of the firms in the Borsa Istanbul sustainability index: integrating multi criteria decision making methods with simulation

Abstract

Regardless of the industry in which a company operates, evaluating corporate performance is one of the most critical and vital processes; the most essential and prominent performance evaluation is related to financial performance. Appropriate performance analysis is complex and critical for decision-makers in different financial performance factors; thus, a methodological framework is needed to solve such complex decision problems. Therefore, this research aims to rank the companies included in the sustainability index (excluding banks) in Turkey by considering their financial performance. The criteria weights were determined using the full consistency method (FUCOM) by considering the evaluations of four experts. The firms were ranked using nine multi-criteria decision-making methods. The consensus among the nine rankings was ensured with the Copeland technique. The decision matrix includes financial ratios and the stock market performance of the firms; 100,000 FUCOM weights were created with random evaluations to validate the results. The results indicate that the most crucial criterion is the current ratio by considering expert evaluations. Weight simulation indicates that alternative 16 (alternative 21) is superior (inferior) to the other alternatives, even though the weights are determined with random evaluations. Ranking with expert evaluations is similar to the mean of the weight simulation results. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework can be performed as a basis for financial performance ranking.