The East Asian miracle: Economic growth and public policy: By the World Bank. (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993. 389 pp. $19.95, paper.)

Economics and Information Theory

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has become an accepted approach for assessing efficiency in a wide range of cases. The present paper suggests a systematic application procedure of the DEA methodology in its various stages. Attention is focused on the selection of ‘decision making units’ (DMUs) to enter the analysis as well as the choice and screening of factors. The application of several DEA models (in different versions and formulations) is demonstrated, in the process of determining relative efficiencies within the compared DMUs.

An application procedure for DEA

Nonlinear Programming: A Unified Approach

From goods to service(s): Divergences and convergences of logics

Innovation ecosystems: A critical examination

Impacts of industrial structure and technical progress on carbon emission intensity: Evidence from 281 cities in China

DEA (data envelopment analysis) is a technique for determining the efficiencyfrontier (the envelope) to the inputs and outputs of a collection of individual corporations or other productive units. DEA is here employed to estimate the intertemporal productive efficiency of U.S. computer manufactures, using financial data brought from earnings statements and balance sheets. The results indicate that a few corporations, including Apple Computer Inc., Compaq Computer Corp., and Seagate Technology were able to stay at the productivity efficiency frontier throughout the time period investigated. But not all successful corporations did; sometimes subefficiency (=disequilibrium) actually goes together with very rapid growth. A new Malmquist type productivity index is calculated for each corporation, measuring shifts of the estimated intertemporal efficiency frontier.

DEA of financial statements data: The U.S. computer industry

Following the characterization via Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) of managerial units as efficient or inefficient, management will wish to increase profitability and/or control costs while becoming (or remaining) technically efficient in the DEA sense. This paper presents three families of models for achieving this and describes the managerial situations in which they are useful. The first addresses the management of an existing Decision Making Unit (DMU) and die second attempts to identify the desired “location” for a new DMU. The third addresses the aggregate of all DMUs, reallocating scarce resources among them for maximum overall organizational profitability and technical efficiency.

Fred Phillips

Papers

Innovation ecosystems: A critical examination

Impacts of industrial structure and technical progress on carbon emission intensity: Evidence from 281 cities in China

DEA of financial statements data: The U.S. computer industry

Models for improved effectiveness based on dea efficiency results

DEA and the management of the product cycle: the U.S. computer industry