Purpose
Environmental crises and resource shortage have been matters of concern worldwide particularly, as the beginning of the twenty-first century. Remanufacturing can be one of the best approaches to promoting the development of circular economy and realizing the efficient use of resources. However, research studies indicate that the general public still remains unaware of the merits of remanufactured products. Hence, investigating main motivations of consumers to purchase remanufactured products is certainly worth exploring. The purpose of this paper is to find out consumers’ key motivations to purchase remanufactured products. A new multi-attributes decision-making method based on prospect theory (PT) is conducted.
Design/methodology/approach
Firstly, according to the prior literature, 12 main factors that influence consumers to purchase a remanufactured product are selected. Then, the single valued triangular neutrosophic numbers and triangular neutrosophic weighted geometric averaging operator are applied to rank them. Secondly, a multi-attribute decision-making method with PT is used to evaluate the utilities of new and remanufactured products, respectively. Based on the utilities, consumers’ preferred choice between the new and remanufactured products can be elicited.
Findings
The proposed method has been applied to a real survey. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is not only capable of recognizing the consumers’ key motivations for purchasing a remanufactured product but also able to deal with the ranking of the new and remanufactured products.
Originality/value
The contributions of this paper are threefold. Firstly, this paper attempts to explore the main motivations that encourage consumers to purchase a remanufactured product, instead of a new one. Secondly, the proposed method is established based on PT, taking consumers’ psychological behavior into consideration, which can obtain a relatively reasonable result. Thirdly, it can enrich the remanufacturing literature, serving as a guideline for consumers when purchasing a remanufactured product. In addition, this paper can help the remanufacturers make pricing and production decisions where necessary.
The Three-Way Decisions Method Based on Theory of Reliability with SV-Triangular Neutrosophic Numbers
