Target intermediate products setting in a two-stage system with fairness concern

Abstract

In a two-stage system with two divisions connected in series, fairly setting the target outputs for the first stage or equivalently the target inputs for the second stage is critical, in order to ensure that the two stages have incentives to collaborate with each other to achieve the best performance of the whole system. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) as a non-parametric approach for efficiency evaluation of multi-input, multi-output systems has drawn a lot of attention. Recently, many two-stage DEA models were developed for studying the internal structures of two-stage systems. However, there was no work studying fair setting of the target intermediate products (or intermediate measures) although unreasonable setting will result in unfairness to the two stages because setting higher (fewer) intermediate measures means that the first (second) stage must make more efforts to achieve the overall production plan. In this paper, a new DEA model taking account of fairness in the setting of the intermediate products is proposed, where the fairness is interpreted based on Nash bargaining game model, in which the two stages negotiate their target efficiencies in the two-stage system based on their individual efficiencies. This approach is illustrated by an empirical application to insurance companies.