PURCHASING EFFICIENCY MEASUREMENT OF AUTOMOBILE MODELS: AN APPLICATION TO TURKISH AUTOMOBILE MARKET

This study approaches the consumer purchase decision problem of automobiles as a performance evaluation problem and aims to analyze if each automobile model is efficient in what it proposes to consumers in return to the financial spendings on that specific model. 259 automobile models that were in the Turkish automobile market during 2014 are analyzed using an efficiency measurement method, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), by taking the economic factors of automobile models as input and technical specifications of the models as output factors. Input and output factors are considered in an importance ranking to consumersand weight restrictions reflecting this ranking are incorporated to standard DEA modelling. The study presents efficiency score of each automobile model in its segment, together with the brand efficiency scores. In addition, the automobile models are clustered into sub-segmets relying on fuel and gear specifications and in each sub-segment efficient automobile models are identified. One of the findings of the study reveals that the measured efficiency scores do not have much reflection on the automobile sales in Turkey during 2014.