A hybrid approach combining AHP with TODIM for blockchain technology provider selection under the Pythagorean fuzzy scenario

Blockchain technology draws worldwide attraction in the latest decade, and distributed ledger technology is widely used in various fields to increase efficiency, fairness, and security based on trust mechanisms. Blockchain technology represents a useful underlying technology to ensure trust in cross-border remittances for major banks and financial institutions. The selection of the appropriate blockchain technology provider is viewed as a classic multicriteria group decision-making (MCGDM) problem, which can be resolved to assist major banks in enhancing the quality of cross-border work. This article presents a combined MCGDM technique uniting the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and TODIM, a Portuguese acronym for interactive multi-criteria decision making, for selecting an appropriate blockchain technology provider with Pythagorean fuzzy (PF) information. First, we establish hierarchical criteria for assessing the performance of blockchain technology providers in accordance with the available literature and characteristics of cross-border remittance work. Second, we adopt the PF–AHP technique to acquire relevant criterion weights, considering uncertainties of the decision-makers’ judgments over the criteria. Third, we utilize the PF–TODIM technique to compute the relevant dominance degree of the providers, taking into account the decision-makers’ psychological behaviors and preferences toward the risk of the blockchain technology. Fourth, we apply the proposed PF–AHP–TODIM technique to choose the appropriate blockchain provider for cross-border remittance work for a major bank and validate the efficiency and practicability of this hybrid technique over other available MCGDM methods.