An integrated data envelopment approach for evaluating the meat companies efficiency

The purpose of this study is to apply the assurance region (AR) concept to restrict the range of input-output weights with expert opinions in the data envelopment approach (DEA). Opinions from 34 experts were collected by a questionnaire in order to rank the importance of cost and revenue sources and measure the influence of business factors with the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP). This article suggests that a DEA with AR specification in variable weights can present realistic results to measure and rank the performance of twenty meat auction companies (MAC) in Taiwan. We categorise MACs into four groups by decomposing their two revenue sources with auction and slaughter priority and recommend the managerial strategies for each group to improve operational efficiency. This consideration is more critical for small samples or industries that are close to the spatial competitive market structure.