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In recent years there has been a significant acceleration in the market growth of social impact investing. Policy makers, regulatory bodies and national decision-makers should base their decision-making processes on multiple criteria. These criteria are, by nature, imprecise, ambiguous and uncertain. The purpose of this paper is to provide decision-makers with a mathematical tool which aids them in their decision-making processes identifying the degree of appropriateness of less developed countries in terms of potential success of investment in vaccination campaigns.

In this work, the authors have developed a decision-making tool within the framework of multiple criteria decision making and Fuzzy Logic, which aims to aid decision-makers for vaccinations campaigns in less developed countries. In particular, the authors have proposed a Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution-based method which is able to work in fuzzy environment in order to assess and rank countries based on their fuzzy degree of appropriateness for impact investing in vaccines.

The impact investing market provides capital from private sources to address many pressing global challenges such as access to basic services as health. Governments have, therefore, an essential role in supporting the development of this market by improving the risk/return profile of investments through access to credit facilities, tax credits or subsidies or defining the regulation of the supply of investments, provision of technical assistance to investing private companies and co-financing. The proposed framework permits funding decision making taking into account the degree of preparedness and adequacy for impact investing in vaccines of the selected countries.

Impact investing can play a key role in the reduction of immunization gap offering suitable strategies for both, governments and private investors for the achievement of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, in order to make good financial decisions managers should take into account not only health, income, education and other social criteria but also the degree of basic preparedness of the countries in order to ensure the success of the immunization campaigns which means taking into account availability of basic infrastructures, access to electricity, political stability among other criteria.

However, in order to make good financial decisions managers should take into account not only health, income, education and other social criteria but also the degree of basic preparedness of the countries in order to ensure the success of the immunization campaigns which means taking into account availability of basic infrastructures, access to electricity, political stability among other criteria.

The proposed model will allow public and private decision makers to make better investment decisions in terms of effectiveness as the provided ranking of countries candidates for the investments is more realistic and takes into account more decision dimensions.

In the last years, the use of free-online instructional videos has gained popularity among educators and students. Its success is mainly based on the provision of fast and inexpensive access to educational contents which can be consulted at the own convenience of students, all over the world. Free-online platforms as YouTube offer access to more than ten million instructional videos. The purpose of this paper is to assess and rank the educational quality of free-online instructional videos from a multidimensional perspective.

In this paper, the authors propose a MCDM approach based on a compromise ranking method, VIKOR. The approach integrates a normalization process which is especially suitable for situations where the nature of the different decision-making criteria is such that it does not allow homogeneous aggregation.

With the proposed normalization approach, the initial valuations of the alternatives with respect to the criteria are transformed in order to reflect their similarity with a given reference point (ideal solution). The normalized data are then integrated in a VIKOR-based framework in order to obtain those mathematical videos closer to the ideal video from the instructors’ perspective.

The ranking of instructional videos based on their quality from an educational multidimensional perspective is a good example of a real decision-making problem where the nature of the criteria, qualitative and quantitative, implies heterogeneous data. The proposed IS-VIKOR approach overcomes some of the problems inherent to this real decision-making problem.

The purpose of this paper is to identify whether the Spanish stock market experiences a negativity effect on the announcement of Spanish consumer sentiment information and if firms that are signatory to the UN Global Compact on corporate social responsibility are relatively more salient in the minds of investors.

The authors use consumer sentiment announcements to show how the negativity effects on the Spanish stock market are significantly influenced by how salient the stock is in the minds of investors. If a firm’s stock exhibits negativity effects on the release of consumer sentiment information then this stock is salient to investors. If firms who are signatory to the UN Global Compact exhibit significant negativity effects, it could be concluded that these stocks are salient, particularly if firms that are not signatory to the Global Compact do not exhibit a similar negativity effect.

The IBEX35 index experiences significant negativity effects upon the release of Spanish consumer sentiment announcements. This is similar to that reported in other countries, notably Australia and the USA. Using the constituent firms in the IBEX35 index, the authors find that those firms that are signatory to the UN Global Compact are significantly more likely to experience negativity effects upon the release of Spanish consumer sentiment information than if they are not signatory to the Global Compact. This indicates that firms that are part of the UN Global Compact are more salient to investors.

Available published Spanish data on consumer sentiment.

Little is understood of the impact that consumer sentiment announcements have on stock prices. Studies in USA and Australia have identified significant negativity effects in stock markets when consumer sentiment information is released. This research has found that a psychological negativity bias occurs in firms that are salient to investors. Salience has been found to be important in asset pricing.

This paper tries to find out which companies are more likely to sign the UN Global Compact. These companies are more sensitive to consumer sentiment, because they depend on the everyday decisions of the consumers. The more the companies depend on consumers, the more they care about them. And, when the consumer sentiment goes down, they are more affected by this sentiment. These firms are also more worried about the long term. They are not only thinking about the profits in the short term but also about maintaining the generation of profits in the long term.