Evaluating corporate social responsibility strategies through a multicriteria decision aiding approach

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a central element of organizational strategy, requiring decision-makers to evaluate complex trade-offs among economic, social, and environmental objectives under conditions of uncertainty and imperfect information. Traditional CSR assessment tools often rely on additive aggregation models or single-indicator approaches, which may inadequately capture hierarchical structures, interactions among criteria, and imprecise judgments commonly present in real-world evaluations. This paper proposes a novel framework for the evaluation of CSR strategies, integrating interacting criteria and interval-valued information within a multi-criteria decision analysis perspective. CSR performance is modeled through a hierarchical structure encompassing economic, social, environmental, and governance dimensions, decomposed into operational sub-criteria. Imperfect knowledge regarding criterion evaluations, weights, and decision thresholds is explicitly represented using interval numbers, allowing for a realistic treatment of expert judgment and stakeholder heterogeneity. The proposed approach is illustrated through case studies of organizations implementing alternative CSR strategies, where decision alternatives are evaluated and classified using hierarchical interval outranking relations. The method enables both global CSR assessments and partial evaluations at intermediate levels of the hierarchy, providing insights into organizational strengths and weaknesses across CSR dimensions.