Data Envelopment Analysis Balanced Benchmarking

The current book introduces the methodology of data envelopment analysis (DEA). DEA uses mathematical programming techniques and models to evaluate the performance of peer units (e.g., bank branches, hospitals and schools) in terms of multiple performance measures or metrics. These multiple performance measures are classified or coined as DEA inputs and DEA outputs. Although DEA has a strong link to production theory in economics, the tool is also used for benchmarking in operations management, where a set of measures is selected to benchmark the performance of manufacturing and service operations. In the circumstance of benchmarking, the efficient DMUs, as defined by DEA, may not necessarily form a "production frontier", but rather lead to a "best-practice frontier". DEA's empirical orientation and absence of a priori assumptions have resulted in its use in a number of studies involving efficient or best-practice frontier estimation in the nonprofit, regulated, and private sectors. DEA applications involve a wide range of contexts, such as education, health care, banking, armed forces, auditing, market research, retail outlets, organization effectiveness, transportation, public housing, and manufacturing. DEA is a balanced benchmarking tool that will help organizations to examine their assumptions about their productivity and performance. The book provides students, researchers, and practitioners with a solid understanding of the methodology, its uses and potentials in business analytics.

Managers are often under great pressure to improve the performance of their organizations. To improve performance, one needs to constantly evaluate operations or processes related to producing products, providing services, and marketing and selling products. Performance evaluation and benchmarking are a widely used method to identify and adopt best practices as a means to improve performance and increase productivity, and are particularly valuable when no objective or engineered standard is available to define efficient and effective performance. For this reason, benchmarking is often used in managing service operations, because service standards (benchmarks) are more difficult to define than manufacturing standards. Benchmarks can be established but they are somewhat limited as they work with single measurements one at a time. It is difficult to evaluate an organization’s performance when there are multiple inputs and outputs to the system. The difficulties are further enhanced when the relationships between the inputs and the outputs are complex and involve unknown tradeoffs. It is critical to show benchmarks where multiple measurements exist. The current book introduces the methodology of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and its uses in performance evaluation and benchmarking under the context of multiple performance measures.

Basic DEA models; Measure-specific DEA models; Returns-to-scale; DEA with preference; Modeling undesirable measures; Context-dependent Data Envelopment analysis; Benchmarking models; Models for evaluating value chains; Congestion; Super efficiency; Sensitivity analysis and its uses; DEA excel solver.

The current book introduces the methodology of data envelopment analysis (DEA) as a data-oriented operations analytics. This data analysis tool analyzes multiple performance metrics, integrates multi-dimensional data into a composite index, and recommends directions for improvement. A number of DEA books have been written for conventional and new DEA models. Yet, many of these books still require fundamental and necessary knowledge on linear mathematical optimization. This book is uniquely designed to present the DEA methodology in an applied setting where a reader is not required to have the knowledge on linear programming and linear algebra.

This book covers recent advances in efficiency evaluations, most notably Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) methods. It introduces the underlying theories, shows how to make the relevant calculations and discusses applications. The aim is to make the reader aware of the pros and cons of the different methods and to show how to use these methods in both standard and non-standard cases. Several software packages have been developed to solve some of the most common DEA and SFA models. This book relies on R, a free, open source software environment for statistical computing and graphics. This enables the reader to solve not only standard problems, but also many other problem variants. Using R, one can focus on understanding the context and developing a good model. One is not restricted to predefined model variants and to a one-size-fits-all approach. To facilitate the use of R, the authors have developed an R package called Benchmarking, which implements the main methods within both DEA and SFA. The book uses mathematical formulations of models and assumptions, but it de-emphasizes the formal proofs - in part by placing them in appendices -- or by referring to the original sources. Moreover, the book emphasizes the usage of the theories and the interpretations of the mathematical formulations. It includes a series of small examples, graphical illustrations, simple extensions and questions to think about. Also, it combines the formal models with less formal economic and organizational thinking. Last but not least it discusses some larger applications with significant practical impacts, including the design of benchmarking-based regulations of energy companies in different European countries, and the development of merger control programs for competition authorities.

This handbook represents a milestone in the progression of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Written by experts who are often major contributors to DEA theory, it includes a collection of chapters that represent the current state-of-the-art in DEA research. Topics include distance functions and their value duals, cross-efficiency measures in DEA, integer DEA, weight restrictions and production trade-offs, facet analysis in DEA, scale elasticity, benchmarking and context-dependent DEA, fuzzy DEA, non-homogenous units, partial input-output relations, super efficiency, treatment of undesirable measures, translation invariance, stochastic nonparametric envelopment of data, and global frontier index. Focusing only on new models/approaches of DEA, the book includes contributions from Juan Aparicio, Mette Asmild, Yao Chen, Wade D. Cook, Juan Du, Rolf Färe, Julie Harrison, Raha Imanirad, Andrew Johnson, Chiang Kao, Abolfazl Keshvari, Timo Kuosmanen, Sungmook Lim, Wenbin Liu, Dimitri Margaritis, Reza Kazemi Matin, Ole B. Olesen, Jesus T. Pastor, Niels Chr. Petersen, Victor V. Podinovski, Paul Rouse, Antti Saastamoinen, Biresh K. Sahoo, Kaoru Tone, and Zhongbao Zhou.

This book presents the methodology and applications of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) in measuring productivity, efficiency and effectiveness in Financial Services firms such as banks, bank branches, stock markets, pension funds, mutual funds, insurance firms, credit unions, risk tolerance, and corporate failure prediction. Financial service DEA research includes banking; insurance businesses; hedge, pension and mutual funds; and credit unions. Significant business transactions among financial service organizations such as bank mergers and acquisitions and valuation of IPOs have also been the focus of DEA research. The book looks at the range of DEA uses for financial services by presenting prior studies, examining the current capabilities reflected in the most recent research, and projecting future new uses of DEA in finance related applications.