An application of Fuzzy DEMATEL electronic life-insurance development

For years, e-commerce has generated competitive advantage for many industries especially in insurance industry where people could apply for any sort of insurance, very easily. In fact, insurance industry has become one of the most important sectors in the world. E-commerce, on the other hand, has absorbed various people in insurance industry to develop economic growth. However, applying e-commerce for insurance firms may encounter serious obstacles and it is important to know them properly and setup appropriate actions to remove them. In this paper, we present a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) technique based on DEMATEL with an adaptation of fuzzy logic to find important factors impacting implementation of e-commerce for life insurance industry. The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some insurance experts and then we analyze them using fuzzy DEMATEL technique. Findings indicate that “lack of designing death table based on the existing statistics of population death in Iran”, “lack of variety in protections of life insurance in proportionate to society individual’s requirements by means of low level income of society individuals” and “lack of extensive advertisements for developing the culture of life insurance in country” are the most important factors influencing insurance industry for enhancing e-business.