Sustainable supplier selection with multidimensional overlapping criteria under carbon neutrality

Purpose Sustainable supplier selection is of vital importance in sustainability decision of supply chain under carbon neutrality. Multi-criteria decision-making approaches are widely used in sustainable supplier selection and generally classified the involved criteria into three sustainable development (SD) dimensions: Environmental, Social and Economic. During the assignment of appropriate weighted scores to the criteria, most of the methods considered mutually exclusive criteria. However, some criteria cover multidimensions since ambiguity vagueness makes them difficult to classify into one dimension exclusively. The purpose of this paper is to find proper approaches addressed to multidimensional overlapping criteria in the evaluation of suppliers’ sustainability performance. Design/methodology/approach This study proposes three approaches to resolve the multidimensional overlapping criteria issue by data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods. The first approach uses all dimensional criteria and “dimensional overlapping criteria” in a single DEA model. The second approach consists of two-stage DEA. The first stage is to find SD dimensional performances, which are used in the second stage. The third approach uses an aggregate weight-constrained DEA model with additional constraints. Such approaches are applied to an empirical case study with six dimensions. Findings Results indicate that the third approach is better than the first two approaches in balancing the development among all dimensions instead of focusing on the superiority dimension to obtain high performance. Originality/value Discussing overlapping criteria in the context of sustainable supplier evaluation and other multi-criteria evaluation have a noticeable impact on evaluation systems, but appropriate approaches for this issue are currently under-researched.