Measuring economic efficiency with incomplete price information: With an application to European commercial banks

Measuring economic efficiency requires complete price information, while resorting to technical efficiency exclusively does not allow one to utilise any price information. In most studies, at least some information on the prices is available from theory or practical knowledge of the industry under evaluation. In this paper we extend the theory of efficiency measurement to accommodate incomplete price information by deriving upper and lower bounds for Farrell's overall economic efficiency. The bounds typically give a better approximation for economic efficiency than technical efficiency measures that use no price data whatsoever. From an operational point of view, we derive new data envelopment analysis (DEA) models for computing these bounds using standard linear programming. The practical application of these estimators is illustrated with an empirical application to large European Union commercial banks. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.