Mass Collaboration-Driven Method for Recommending Product Ideas Based on Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence

In the mass collaboration mode, there exist a large number of product ideas with low value density and thousands of participants who are differed on their professional backgrounds, knowledge structures, and value orientations. It is impossible for each participant to give a comprehensive evaluation of each idea as that in traditional methods for the reasons as mentioned above. In order to solve this problem, a mass collaboration-driven method for recommending product ideas is proposed based on Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence (DST). Firstly, the method for computing basic probability assignment (BPA) function, which can effectively reflect the facticity of experts’ evaluations, is introduced by discounting belief degrees with weights to extract the evaluation information of product ideas. Then, Dempster’s combination rule is used to combine the derived BPA functions for two times: the first one is to combine the discounted BPA functions on all criteria with respect to a specified expert and the other is to combine the combined BPA functions for all experts with respect to a specified alternative. Finally, the steps of mass collaboration-driven method for recommending product ideas based on the DST are proposed. An illustrative example is provided to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method.