Importance of intellectual capital components in management decision-making processes of French companies: An empirical study using Shapley’s value and Lambda fuzzy measurement method

Objective: Most of the research work related to the topic of intellectual capital has been focused on the interaction between intellectual capital or its particular components on the different financial performance. This paper contributes to the literature by proposing different levels of contribution of intellectual capital components in the total intellectual capital. Methodology: This paper adopted quantitative statistical methods Lambda phase measurement and Shapley’s value on the sample of 498 French companies in the period of 2008 to 2016 in order to estimate the highest and lowest importance of intellectual capital components. Findings: By the Shapley’s value final result, the greatest importance has the third variable, which represents company’s commercial activities. The third variable belongs to the third intellectual capital component – relational capital, and it contributes with the highest coefficient of 0.29911. By the same methods, the Research Asset Value variable has the lowest importance and it represents the value coming from research and development expenses with the coefficient of 0.07463. Implications and limitations: Even though, the correlation between intellectual capital components exists as well as their contribution on the final result, the present study points out on different levels of contribution of each intellectual capital component. The limitations of this paper are concentrated on unavailability of the quantitative data from the official annual reports of companies. Original feature: This study presents the distribution of contribution of different intellectual capital components based on the empirical approach using quantitative data from company’s annual reports.