Performance measurement of insurance firms using a two-stage DEA method

Measuring the relative performance of insurance firms plays an important role in this industry. In this paper, we present a two-stage data envelopment analysis to measure the performance of insurance firms, which were active over the period of 2006-2010. The proposed study of this paper performs DEA method in two stages where the first stage considers five inputs and three outputs while the second stage considers the outputs of the first stage as the inputs of the second stage and uses three different outputs for this stage. The results of our survey have indicated that while there were 4 efficient insurance firms most other insurances were noticeably inefficient. This means market was monopolized mostly by a limited number of insurance firms and competition was not fare enough to let other firms participate in economy, more efficiently.