Scale efficiency of China's regional R & D value chain: A double frontier network DEA approach

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is one of the vastly available literature on efficiency analysis. In general, the efficiency of decision making units (DMUs) can be measured from two perspectives, optimistic and pessimistic. Two different perspectives lead to two different conflicting and biased scale efficiency measurements. To deal with the problem, in this paper, we introduce a double frontier approach to integrate both optimistic and pessimistic scale efficiencies' viewpoints in one single scale efficiency term, which will be more realistic and has benchmarking preferences. We first investigate the scale efficiency concept from double frontier perspective in black-box DEA and then extend it to the two-stage DEA framework. Mathematical analysis proved that the double frontier scale efficiency of a two-stage system could be decomposed into the internal stages' double frontier scale efficiencies. Finally, we elaborate applicability and merits of the proposed approach using a case of China's regional R & D value chain in terms of its profitability and marketability.