Capacity utilization change over time

Frontier-based capacity utilization (CU) measures are the mainstream in CU evaluation of either firms or productive units in various fields. Traditional CU models have not developed a reasonable way to solve the incomparability problem, since efficiencies of the decision making units (DMUs) under a given production technology are not comparable to those of other DMUs under a different technology, which exists especially in data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a systematic solution for the measurement of CU change over time, which reveals the variation of CU among different periods. To overcome the prevalent infeasibility problem since one or more DMUs cannot be projected onto the frontier in a certain direction, we further incorporate fixed-base global and overall techniques in redefining CU and CU change indices. To illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed models, we also employ a sample of Chinese universities to conduct the empirical analysis.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a systematic solution for the comparability problem in CU evaluation and applies it to an empirical analysis of Chinese universities.