Software for Business Studies

IAA

IAA - Industry Attractiveness Analysis for Windows

This IAA (Industry Attractiveness Analysis) program ((c)Josef & Markus Mazanec, 1987-2008) constructs multifactor portfolio diagrams by processing the user's evaluative judgments of market attractiveness and competitive position criteria and their importances. Unlike the common and simple scoring models IAA computes criteria weights from pairweise comparison judgments. These judgments are checked for logical consistency with Saaty's eigenvector method which is widely known as the core of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) in multicriteria decision making. The test data file SAMPLDAT.IAA contains 4 tourism generating countries.

The theory of Multifactor Portfolio Models is nicely recapitulated in Kerin, R.A., Mahajan, V., Varadarajan, P.R. (1990), Contemporary Perspectives on Strategic Market Planning, Chapter 3, pp. 71-113, Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

An illustrative example of the traditional multifactor approach ('industry attractiveness analysis') is reported in Henshall, B.D., Roberts, R. (1985), Comparative Assessment of Tourist Generating Markets for New Zealand, Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 12, pp. 219-238. For a case study with tourism destinations see Mazanec, J. A. (1998), International Tourism Marketing: A Multi-Factor Portfolio Model, in: Hartvig-Larsen, H. (ed.), Cases in Marketing, London 1998: Sage Publications, pp. 115-141.

The eigenvector method and the Analytical Hierarchy Process was originally introduced in Saaty, Th. L. (1977), A Scaling Method for Priorities in Hierarchical Structures, Journal of Mathematical Psychology, Vol. 15, pp. 87-114. For a concise discussion of the Analytic Hierarchy Process with the eigenvector method as the core technique see Dyer, R. F., Forman, E. H. (1991), An Analytic Approach to Marketing Decisions, Chapter 5, pp. 87-114, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. A comparison of the eigenvector method with other decision support techniques is presented in Hwang, Ch.L., Yoon, Kw., Multiple Attribute Decision Making, Methods and Applications (1981), A State-of-the-Art Survey, pp. 41-47, Berlin-Heidelberg-New York: Springer.

The Saaty method for prompting and processing managerial judgments with a demonstration for international tourism is explained in Mazanec, J. A., How to Evaluate a Travel Market, Economic Modeling vs. Multiattribute Decision Making with Management Estimat es (1986), Les Cahiers du Tourisme, Série C, no. 48, Aix-en-Provence: Centre des Hautes Etudes Touristiques, and in Mazanec, J. A. (1998), International Tourism Marketing: A Multi-Factor Portfolio Model, in: Hartvig-Larsen, H. (ed.), Teaching Manual for Cases in Marketing, London 1998: Sage Publications, pp. 101-127.