Measuring balanced effectiveness and efficiency of German business schools’ research performance

The selection, aggregation and analysis of research performance data acquired by the Centre for Higher Education (CHE) as well as its assessment method identifying leading research business schools are controversially discussed in literature and praxis. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) provides an alternative method to aggregate research performance data. Thereby however, business schools can achieve high effectiveness or efficiency scores by taking into account only some and not all indicators considered as relevant, resulting in an incomplete picture of business schools’ research performance. In this paper we therefore measure and analyze a new key performance indicator, the balance score respective the specialization degree of a business school by using the new method Balanced-DEA. This indicator reflects to which extent the research performance of a business school is balanced or specialized relative to predefined virtual balanced reference points.