Multi-period efficiency measurement in data envelopment analysis: The case of Taiwanese commercial banks

• We construct a model for measuring the multi-period efficiency of banks.
• The overall efficiency is a weighted average of period-specific efficiencies.
• The performance of Taiwanese commercial banks improves steadily from 2009 to 2011.
• The multi-period analysis results in more discriminative rankings.

In measuring the overall efficiency of a set of decision making units (DMUs) in a time span covering multiple periods, the conventional approach is to use the aggregate data of the multiple periods via a data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique, ignoring the specific situation of each period. This paper proposes using a relational network model to take the operations of individual periods into account in measuring efficiencies. The overall and period efficiencies of a DMU can be calculated at the same time. Notably, the overall efficiency is a weighted average of the period efficiencies, and the weights are the most favorable ones for the DMU being evaluated. This model, together with two existing ones, is applied to measure the efficiency of 22 Taiwanese commercial banks for the period of 2009–2011. The three-year multi-period analysis shows that the proposed model is more discriminative than the existing ones in ranking the performance of the banks. The period efficiencies for the three years increased steadily, indicating that the performances of the Taiwanese banks examined in this work were improving over this period.