The ambiguous proposal evaluation problem

A complex decision-making challenge senior managers commonly face is the selection of the winning bid from multiple project proposals. Project selection decisions become more complex when providers deliberately choose to introduce ambiguity to their project proposals rather than address the client's predetermined set of desired specifications. In particular, providers suggest in their proposals a range of values for some product specifications. Providers introduce ambiguity for various reasons, such as future technological advances and strategic misrepresentation. Further, such disruptive behaviour is tolerated by clients for reasons such as ambition, lack of knowledge, uncertain needs, complexity and a lack of competition. This paper defines the ambiguous proposal evaluation problem and develops a solution which enables such proposals to be compared and ranked. The solution is developed through the utilisation of fuzzy logic in combination with a multi-criteria decision-making method, and is illustrated on a procurement project. The contribution of this paper is firstly to define a practical problem in the literature and secondly to develop a solution which enables ranking ambiguous options.