An Introduction to Data Envelopment Analysis: A Tool for Performance Measurement

From the Foreword: ′This book is an excellent tool for practitioners who are interested in the merits and pitfalls of the technique…. (The author′s) research is an example of inventiveness, diligence and accuracy′ - Freerk A. Lootsma, Delft Institute of Technology Data envelopment Analysis is a Mathematical Programme for measuring performance efficiency of organizational units. The organizational units, termed as decision-making units (DMU) can be of any kind: manufacturing units, a set of schools, banks, hospitals, power plants, police stations, prisons, a set of firms etc. DEA has been unsuccessfully applied to measure the performance efficiency of these different kinds of DMUs which share a common characteristic - that they are non-profit organization where measurement of performance efficiency is difficult. DEA has been employed for assessing the relative performance of a set of firms that use a variety of identical inputs-say in the case of a school: quality of students, teachers, grants etc.,-to produce a variety of identical outputs-number of students who pass the final year, average grades obtained by the students in the final year etc. DEA assumes the performance of the DMUs by using the concepts of efficiency or productivity which is measured as the ratio of total outputs to total inputs. Also, the efficiencies estimated are relative to the best performing DMU or DMUs. The best performing DMU is given a score of 100% and the performance of other DMUs vary between 0 -100%.