A note on efficiency decomposition in two-stage data envelopment analysis

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a useful tool of efficiency measurement for firms and organizations. Mao and Hwang (2008) take into account the series relationship of the two sub-processes in a two-stage production process, and the overall efficiency of the whole process is the product of the efficiencies of the two sub-processes. To find the largest efficiency of one sub-process while maintaining the maximum overall efficiency of the whole process, Mao and Hwang (2008) propose a solution procedure to accomplish this purpose. Nevertheless, one needs to know the overall efficiency of the whole process before calculating the sub-process efficiency. In this note, we propose a method that is able to find the sub-process and overall efficiencies simultaneously. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.