Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Socio-Economic Planning Sciences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/seps A hybrid multi-criteria decision making approach for strategic retail location investment: Application to Turkish food retailing Nurdan Yıldız a , Fatih Tüysüz b,* a Department of Industrial Engineering, Istanbul Gelisim University, 34310, Avcılar, Istanbul, Turkey b Department of Industrial Engineering, Istanbul University, 34320, Avcılar, Istanbul, Turkey ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Food retailing Strategic location investment Hesitant AHP GRA Monte Carlo simulation ABSTRACT Retail location selection decision is a critical and complex process which requires the evaluation and aggregation of multiple criteria and also the usage of appropriate data related to them. This study handles the problem at a strategic level and proposes a Monte Carlo simulation based multi-criteria strategic location decision model for food retailing. This model integrates two multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods which are Hesitant Analytic Hierarchy Process (H-AHP) and Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) methods. Firstly, H-AHP method is used to obtain the weights of criteria to be used in GRA based on the experts' judgements. Secondly, simulation based GRA is used for ranking the alternative locations. Finally, the effectiveness and the applicability of the proposed model is illustrated with an application of strategic location investment decision of food retail stores in Turkey. 1. Introduction There are many definitions of retailing which can be simply defined as selling the products or services of producers to customers through different channels of distribution [1]. It is a highly dynamic and fast growing sector which is affected by many factors such as competition, location, changing consumer behavior and demographics, technology, globalization etc. Although the technological developments have led to multiple ways of retailing, the traditional bricks and mortar stores are still popular and valid forms of retailing, especially for food retailing which is selling food like products through emporiums and super- markets. As Mazza and Rydin [2] state that retail sector creates employment, provides income by generating taxes and reflects the community's viability and vitality, which make it a city's one of the most important economic activities. Retail activities have effect on city's economic condition in terms of creating employment and supplying people's needs, social condition in terms of diversity, product quality and availability of the same prices for all, and environment in terms of transportation. All these make the retailing an important and integral part of urban policy making [3]. It can also be concluded that although retailing is a private sector economic activity, public authorities' plan- ning, regulations and policies may have effect on this activity [4]. For these reasons, retail planning or retail investment decisions can also be considered as a socio-economic problem which is also valid in this study. Although, this study handles the problem from a private sector point of view, retail planning or retail investment decisions can also be considered as a socio-economic problem, which is also valid in this study, due to the reasons mentioned above. Socio-economic factors such as rising incomes, rising female parti- cipation in workforce, increasing level of urbanization and changing demographics in population increase the demand for supermarket re- tailing [5]. Turkey's food retail sector has been gaining attention of the international retailers due to its growing economy, favorable popula- tion demographics and the quick rate of returns on investment [3,6]. Besides, central government, government agencies and chamber of commerce in Turkey support these organized retailers since they have positive effects on social, economic and environmental effects [3]. This is also the main motivation of the real application of the study. Food retailers have to satisfy their customer expectations and adapt to the continuously changing market's requirements in global compe- tition environment [7]. They also need to expand their markets and reach more customers in order to maintain their presence in this en- vironment. Location of retail store provides competitive and unique advantage to retailers [8]. Selection of location is an important strategic decision and has a great effect on overall success of the retailer since such decisions involve long-term commitment of resources and gen- erally represent a substantial investment which may affect the long- term profitability and sustainability of the company [9,10]. Another important characteristics of location selection problem for the retailers is that it is usually irreversible which means that it cannot be overcome easily. It can be said that location is the most important among all https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seps.2018.02.006 Received 20 February 2017; Received in revised form 31 January 2018; Accepted 23 February 2018 * Corresponding author. E-mail address: fatih.tuysuz@istanbul.edu.tr (F. Tüysüz). Socio-Economic Planning Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0038-0121/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Yıldız, N., Socio-Economic Planning Sciences (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seps.2018.02.006