Weighting ESG criteria of banks by using interval valued intuitionistic fuzzy best worst method

Abstract

Even though the ESG-financial performance relationship is well addressed with the ambiguous results, the literature lacks to determine the relative importance of individual ESG criteria regarding sustainability. To fill this gap, the study aims to determine the relative weights of ESG criteria for the banking industry from the perspective of scholars. To reach the aim of the paper, we employ Interval Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy Best Worst Method and reveal that Governance (C3) is the most significant criteria among the main criteria, followed by Social (C2) and Environment (C1) criteria. Regarding sub-criteria, Management (G1), Shareholders (G2) and Workforce (S1) are the most significant sub-criteria whereas Product responsibility (S4), Resource Use (E1) and Emissions (E2) are the least significant sub-criteria, respectively. These results do not fully represent real weights because of the subjective judgments of decision makers but it gives banking sector practitioners to comparable reference to allocate their scarce resources.