Performance Assessment of University Departments Using DEA: An Exploratory Study (Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Iran)

Although teaching and research are considered as the two major tasks of any university, they are difficult to measure. To measure the relative efficiency of a set of Decision-Making Units (DMUs) that utilize the same inputs to produce the same outputs, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has been demonstrated to be a suitable method. The Faculty of Management and Economics is one of the several faculties of Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman in Iran. It consists of three departments, viz., accounting, business administration and economics. This paper uses DEA method to assess the relative efficiency of these departments in 1386 solar year (2007-08) for ranking them with regard to research performance.