Data envelopment analysis and game theory : literature review and models to support resource sharing in efficiency measurement contexts

Abstract

Organizations have continually sought alternatives to improve their production systems to achieve competitive advantages and increase market share. Globalized competition and more conscious and demanding customers have demanded better performance. In this context, the measurement of efficiency is presented as an essential assessment for organizations to identify bottlenecks and implement improvements. Among the techniques available in the literature, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is one of the most relevant, having a great diversity of modeling and economic sectors in which evaluations have already been carried out. However, there are still limitations to be mitigated so that investigation can adequately reflect the investigated realities. Thus, this study proposes the integration of DEA with Game Theory to adequately portray the realities of cooperation and non-cooperation existing within organizations. For this, network and dynamic modeling are used to portray aspects related to temporal impacts and the internal structures of companies. These models are combined with cooperative and non-cooperative Game Theory approaches to discuss the allocation of shared resources within these structures and their respective impacts on the efficiencies of processes and organizations. Given the significant number of results generated, a two-dimensional representation of dynamic models is also proposed to help the decision-making process through the representation of these efficiency frontiers. The relevance of the research is related to three main aspects: first, the study carries out an in-depth discussion of the integrated literature on DEA and Game Theory, identifying the pattern of development, main research fronts, and gaps to be discussed in future developments. Second, it also fills a gap in the literature by proposing the introduction of models that adequately reflect the allocation of resource in internal networks. It also provides an alternative to evaluate and improve this usage in cooperative and non-cooperative scenarios. In addition to the two proposed models, the thesis also performs the application of the models proposed for the context of Brazilian public higher education, aiming to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed models in a relevant case for the country's development.