 'This book is an excellent tool for practitioners who are interested  in the merits and pitfalls of the technique.... (The author's) research  is an example of inventiveness, diligence and accuracy' - Freerk A. Lootsma, Delft Institute of Technology
'This book is an excellent tool for practitioners who are interested  in the merits and pitfalls of the technique.... (The author's) research  is an example of inventiveness, diligence and accuracy' - Freerk A. Lootsma, Delft Institute of TechnologyData  envelopment Analysis is a Mathematical Programme for measuring  performance efficiency of organizational units. The organizational  units, termed as decision-making units (DMU) can be of any kind:  manufacturing units, a set of schools, banks, hospitals, power plants,  police stations, prisons, a set of firms etc.
DEA has  been unsuccessfully applied to measure the performance efficiency of  these different kinds of DMUs which share a common characteristic - that  they are non-profit organization where measurement of performance  efficiency is difficult.
DEA has been employed for  assessing the relative performance of a set of firms that use a variety  of identical inputs-say in the case of a school: quality of students,  teachers, grants etc.,-to produce a variety of identical outputs-number  of students who pass the final year, average grades obtained by the  students in the final year etc.
DEA assumes the  performance of the DMUs by using the concepts of efficiency or  productivity which is measured as the ratio of total outputs to total  inputs. Also, the efficiencies estimated are relative to the best  performing DMU or DMUs. The best performing DMU is given a score of 100%  and the performance of other DMUs vary between 0 -100%.
 


