Data Envelopment Analysis in management literature

Abstract

Performance measurement is essential in business. An important key to improvement is for management to assess the effective and ineffective aspects of activities, to identify improvement directions that give an advantage over competitors or allow for better use of
resources. A wide range of literature is aiming to help decision-makers to find the right tools to support their decisions. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a well-known methodology for measuring effectiveness in operations research. The Hungarian and international literature abounds with examples of its application. According to a study by Emrouznejad and Jang (2018), more than
10,000 articles on DEA were published in international journals in the 21 years between 1995 and 2016, and the number of published articles is increasing year by year. Nevertheless, DEA has not really gained ground in Hungarian business practice and education.
The aim of this article is to explore and present the business applications of DEA and to give an overview of recent methodological
developments in DEA. To this end, we have carried out a literature review, using literature analyses on DEA published in  international journals to provide an overview of the potential applications of the DEA methodology. A database of 47 articles was compiled from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The collection date is 20 October 2020, and articles published or accepted in journals prior to that date were included in the sample. For the collection of results published in Hungarian, we used the Scholar Google and MATARKA databases.