Journal of Productivity Analysis

, Volume 5, Issue 3, pp 229–248 | Cite as

DEA of financial statements data: The U.S. computer industry

  • Sten Thore
  • George Kozmetsky
  • Fred Phillips
Article

Abstract

DEA (data envelopment analysis) is a technique for determining the efficiencyfrontier (the envelope) to the inputs and outputs of a collection of individual corporations or other productive units. DEA is here employed to estimate the intertemporal productive efficiency of U.S. computer manufactures, using financial data brought from earnings statements and balance sheets. The results indicate that a few corporations, including Apple Computer Inc., Compaq Computer Corp., and Seagate Technology were able to stay at the productivity efficiency frontier throughout the time period investigated. But not all successful corporations did; sometimes subefficiency (=disequilibrium) actually goes together with very rapid growth. A new Malmquist type productivity index is calculated for each corporation, measuring shifts of the estimated intertemporal efficiency frontier.

Keywords

DEA Malmquist type productivity index 
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Copyright information

© Kluwer Academic Publishers 1994

Authors and Affiliations

  • Sten Thore
    • 1
  • George Kozmetsky
    • 1
  • Fred Phillips
    • 1
  1. 1.IC2 InstituteThe University of Texas at AustinAustin

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