A new method for performance evaluation of decision-making units with application to service industry

Abstract

The decision-making units (DMUs) in the modern service industries may produce desirable outputs and undesirable outputs. For the decision makers, some outputs may be more desired than others although all of them are desirable. Considering these characteristics, this work combines the data envelopment analysis (DEA) and the multiple attributes decision-making (MADM) method, to make a reasonable and comprehensive performance evaluation for DMUs. Specifically, three DEA-based models are modified to obtain more reasonable efficiency scores for DMUs. The MADM method is used to determine the weights of outputs based on the preference ratings within the outputs. The efficiency scores are then multiplied by the aggregated outputs quantities to obtain the comprehensive performance scores for evaluation. The effectiveness of the proposed models is demonstrated by extensive numerical experiments.

Keywords:

• comprehensive performance evaluation
• data envelopment analysis
• multiple attributes decision-making
• preference ratings

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Science and Technology Foundation of Jiangxi Educational Committee [grant number GJJ190287].