Abstract
This study adopts the data envelopment analysis (DEA), including the Banker, Charnes, and Cooper and system DEA estimation, to investigate the operating efficiency of Taiwanese Hotels under different efficient frontier systems. The results are summarised as follows: (1) the efficiency of chain-operated hotels are higher than the efficiency of independent-operated hotels; (2) if different frontier systems are assessed by the same frontier, then it will cause a wrong judgement in efficient reference sets; (3) if the hotels are treated as independent samples, then some inefficient hotels are mistaken as being efficient; and (4) the independent type take the chain type as efficient reference sets.