Efficiency Analysis of Dried Apricot Farms Using Fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis

The aim of this research is to measure the efficiency of dried apricot farms using fuzzy data envelopment analysis. Dried apricot production, as in all agricultural production, takes place in an uncertain environment, therefore input and output data of farms include imprecise. Since the efficiency scores of convectional data envelopment analysis obtained using imprecise data are unbiased and inconsistent, to improve the reliable and robust efficiency scores, one of the proposed methods is fuzzy data envelopment analysis. In the research, the proposed approach by Kao & Liu was used to measure the efficiency of farms, which uses a cut levels. To estimate the efficiency scores of farms via this approach, the inputs and output data of 46 dried apricot farms of Battalgazi district of Malatya province of Turkey were used. According the fuzzy data envelopment analysis, the boundaries of efficiency scores of farms changed from 0.899 to 0.909. Since convectional data envelopment analysis is point estimates, the efficiency scores of fuzzy data envelopment analysis, which is expressed by boundaries, has advantages giving major ideas by the different uncertain levels on the relative performance of farm to decision makers.