Data Envelopment Analysis (Productivity)

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a nonparametric, linear-programming technique for measuring the relative productive efficiency of comparable units — firms, plants, hospitals, schools, bank branches — that convert multiple inputs into multiple outputs. Introduced by Charnes, Cooper, and Rhodes in 1978 and rooted in Farrell's 1957 work on efficiency measurement, it constructs a best-practice frontier that envelops the observed data and scores each unit by its distance to that frontier, requiring no assumed functional form for the production technology.