Economies of scope in two-stage production systems: A data envelopment analysis approach

Abstract

Traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) models consider a production system as a black-box without taking into consideration its internal linked activities. In recent years, a number of DEA studies have been presented to estimate efficiency score of two-stage network production systems in which all outputs of the first stage (intermediate products) are used as inputs of the second stage to produce final outputs. This paper aims to develop a two-stage network DEA model to study economic notion of economies of scope (ES) between two products. It intends to determine profitability of joint production of two products by one firm. Numerical illustrations are presented to show applicability of proposed methods.