Performance Ranking and Management Efficiency in Colleges of Business: A Study at the Department Level in Taiwanese Universities

Empirical analysis of the efficiency of higher education institutions has commonly involved the use of data envelopment analysis (DEA). Leading studies in this area include those that measure efficiency at the school level, such as Ahn et al. (1988) on US universities in 1981–1985, Glass et al. (1998) on UK universities in 1989–1992, and Avkiran (2001), Abbott and Doucouliagos (2003) and Carrington et al. (2004) on Australian universities. There are also a few studies that measure efficiency at the departmental level. For example, Madden et al. (1997) assessed the efficiency of economics departments in Australian universities, Johnes and Johnes (1993) assessed the efficiencies of economics departments in the UK in 1984–1988, Haksever and Muragishi (1998) and Colbert et al. (2000) studied the efficiency performance of MBA programs in the US, and Ray and Jeon (2003) employed a production model and DEA to examine the reputation and production efficiency of MBA programs in general.