Multi-criterion two-sided matching of Public-Private Partnership infrastructure projects: Criteria and methods

Abstract

Two kinds of evaluative criteria are associated with Public-Private Partnership (PPP) infrastructure projects, i.e., private evaluative criteria and public evaluative criteria. These evaluative criteria are inversely related, that is, the higher the public benefits; the lower the private surplus. To balance evaluative criteria in the Two-Sided Matching (TSM) decision, this paper develops a quantitative matching decision model to select an optimal matching scheme for PPP infrastructure projects based on the Hesitant Fuzzy Set (HFS) under unknown evaluative criterion weights. In the model, HFS is introduced to describe values of the evaluative criteria and multi-criterion information is fully considered given by groups. The optimal model is built and solved by maximizing the whole deviation of each criterion so that the evaluative criterion weights are determined objectively. Then, the match-degree of the two sides is calculated and a multi-objective optimization model is introduced to select an optimal matching scheme v ia a min-max approach. The results provide new insights and implications of the influence on evaluative criteria in the TSM decision.