Making international expansion decision for construction enterprises with multiple criteria : a literature review approach

Abstract

Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods have been instrumental in various fields of disciplines such as economics and engineering, including construction studies. In the later context, MCDM methodology has been adopted to unravel the decision-making problems as regards international expansion of construction enterprises (IECEs). This paper presents a literature review of the methodology designed as decision support system for IECE. A methodological literature search to collect and identify relevant articles was utilized in top tier Construction Management journals. This study performs content analysis based on problem oriented MCDM applications in IECE. Theoretically, MCDM techniques were used in five contexts of IECE problems: internationalization decision, country or market selection, entry mode selection, project selection or bidding decision and other related international expansion. The types and complexity of problems were dominated by risks in international projects. Both real and simulation data were used to execute and validate the proposed MCDM models. This paper also suggested a number of possible future studies in applying MCDM methods for supporting IECE decision.