Measuring Technical Efficiency of Cars: A Field Investigation in the Italian Domestic Market

This paper implemented Data Envelopment Analysis to develop a measure of technical efficiency (TE) for a car. The measurement of TE uses published technical data and judgements by industry experts. It is assumed that the technical value of a car is a function of a functional feature performance set of the product delivered to users when bearing some usage and ownership costs. TE is calculated for a sample of 216 cars sold in the Italian market from the 1970s to the early 1990s