An approach to the evaluation of the quality of accounting information based on relative entropy in fuzzy linguistic environments

Abstract

There is a risk when company stakeholders make decisions using accounting information with varied qualities in the same way. In order to evaluate the accounting information quality, this paper proposed an approach to the evaluation of the quality of accounting information based on relative entropy in fuzzy linguistic environments. Firstly, the accounting information quality evaluation criteria are constructed not only from the quality of the accounting information content but also from the accounting information generation environment. Considering that the rating values with respect to the criteria are in linguistic forms with different granularities, the method to deal with the linguistic rating values is given. In the method, the linguistic terms are modeled with the 2-tuple linguistic model. Relative entropy is used to calculate the information consistency, which is used to derive the weight of experts and criteria. Finally, the example is given to illustrate the feasibility and practicability of the proposed method.