Compare methods

	Data Envelopment Analysis of Firm Strategic Efficiency	Tobin's Q Firm Value Analysis
Field	Strategic Management	Strategic Management
Family	MCDM	Regression model
Year of origin	1978	1981
Originator	Abraham Charnes, William W. Cooper & Edwardo Rhodes; Rajiv Banker, Charnes & Cooper	Eric B. Lindenberg & Stephen A. Ross; Kee H. Chung & Stephen W. Pruitt
Type	Nonparametric linear-programming efficiency frontier for firm benchmarking	Market-valuation ratio used as a firm performance and rent measure
Seminal source	Charnes, A., Cooper, W. W., & Rhodes, E. (1978). Measuring the efficiency of decision making units. European Journal of Operational Research, 2(6), 429-444.	Lindenberg, E. B., & Ross, S. A. (1981). Tobin's q Ratio and Industrial Organization. Journal of Business, 54(1), 1-32.
Aliases	DEA Firm Efficiency Benchmarking, Strategic Efficiency Frontier Analysis, Firm-Level Data Envelopment Analysis, DEA Best-Practice Benchmarking	Tobin's Q Ratio Analysis, Market-to-Replacement-Cost Analysis, Q-Ratio Firm Performance Measure, Approximate Tobin's Q
Related	3	3
Summary	Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) of firm strategic efficiency benchmarks each firm or strategic business unit against a best-practice frontier built directly from the data, with no need to assume prices, weights, or a functional form. Introduced by Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes in 1978 under constant returns to scale (the CCR model) and extended by Banker, Charnes and Cooper in 1984 to variable returns (the BCC model), DEA uses linear programming to envelop the observed firms with a piecewise-linear frontier and scores each one by its radial distance from it. In strategic management it answers a sharply practical question: given the resources a firm consumes, how much more output could it produce if it operated like the best comparable firms, and which efficient peers should it emulate.	Tobin's q is the ratio of a firm's market value to the replacement cost of its assets, and it serves in strategy and industrial organization as a forward-looking measure of value creation and economic rent. A q above one means the market values the firm at more than it would cost to rebuild its assets, signaling that the firm earns rents -- from market power, brands, technology, or hard-to-replicate capabilities -- beyond the competitive return on capital. Lindenberg and Ross's 1981 study brought q into empirical industrial organization, developing an algorithm to estimate the replacement cost of assets and showing how q relates to monopoly power and barriers to entry. Because exact replacement costs are laborious, Chung and Pruitt's 1994 paper introduced a simple approximation built entirely from standard accounting and market data that tracks the exact measure closely, making q practical for large-sample research on firm performance.