Stochastic DEA for restructure strategy: an application to a Japanese petroleum company

DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) is a management science method that has been widely applied for performance analysis in various sectors. A shortcoming of previous DEA applications is that it has been used to mainly evaluate ex ante performance. Believing that future planning is more important than past evaluation, this study documents how to incorporate future information into DEA. A stochastic DEA model is presented and then it is reformulated in the manner that the stochastic model can incorporate future information. The proposed approach is referred to as "DEA future analysis" in this study. To document the practicality of DEA future analysis, this research applies the proposed approach to plan the restructure strategy of a Japanese petroleum company. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.