Researches About Resource Allocation From The Efficiency Viewpoint

Resource refers to all kinds of substance elements in the social and economic activities, such as human, material and financial resources. They are the basic material conditions for the social and economic development. In a certain stage of social and economic development, relative to the demand of human, resources always show the relative scarcity, which needs the people to reasonably allocate the limited and scare resource so as to reduce the resource waste, produce more applicable products and services and obtain more profits. Resource allocation is to make a suitable choice among different utilizations according to their comparison. Resource allocation is the enterprise strategic adjustment method, and is also a daily work of enterprise management. Optimizing the allocation of resources is to make some trade-off and eventually get the global optimal solution. Whether resource allocation is reasonable or not has an extremely important influence on an organization’s success or failure and even national economic development.Currently, most of the organizations allocate the resources through a series of financial indicators and the coordination among the organization departments, but these two methods have no strict mathematical theory supports. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) method has a good advantage compared with the above methods. DEA can estimate the possible allocation effects according to the actual characteristics of the production possibility set so as to provide reasonable allocation scheme. By DEA method, we can consider allocation alternatives from multiple dimensions, which can effectively avoid the deviation caused by rarely few evaluation indicators. The introduction of DEA brings a new blood to the study of resource allocation. DEA was is a non-parametric approach firstly proposed by Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes, which evaluates a group of homogenous decision making units (DMUs) with multiple inputs and multiple outputs based on the concept of "relative efficiency". It can effectively model systems with multiple inputs and outputs. This method measures the efficiency of a DMU according to a pricewise linear hyperplane instead of the regression hyperplane in multivariate statistics methods. It does not need to assume a linear or nonlinear relationship between the input and output variables as in multivariate statistical regression analysis. It does not require the assumption of a functional form for the production function and can well estimate the production frontier of DMUs with multiple inputs and multiple outputs.The paper is organized as follows: Chapter1mainly introduces the concept of the resources, the importance of resources allocation, the related theoretical basis, the DEA method, and briefly reviews the existing research on the allocation of resources. Then, we introduce the framework of the main research of this thesis.Chapters2and3focus on solving the resource allocation problem within the organization by data envelopment analysis (DEA). We propose three integrated models for allocating resources. The first model aims at minimizing the input consumption, the second one aims at maximizing the total outputs within the current resources, and the last one aims at maximizing the total outputs using the predicted resources in the next production season. Since the number of inputs or outputs is usually more than one, the above mentioned issues are often multiple objective linear programming (MOLP) problems. Through the proportion of inputs (outputs) of each new decision making unit (DMU) to the total inputs (outputs) of all old DMUs, the MOLP problems can be transformed into some single objective linear programming models. Based on the work in Chapter2, Chapter3will further study the resource allocation problem with the consideration of both economic and environmental factors. According to the predicted resource amounts in the next production period (one is larger than that in the present period, another is smaller than that in this period and the third is equal to that in this period), three different resource allocation problems under these scenarios are analyzed by DEA approach.Merger and acquisition (M&A) is common activities in the organizations, which is one of important measures for improving the managerial performance. This kind of problem usually involves a large amount of resources. The alternative of M&A plays a crucial role to the success of M&A, and also almost determines the future direction of the new merged organization. Thus, this frontier topic has a strong theoretical value and profound realistic significance. Chapter4will focus on this issue. We will provide a greedy algorithm for a DMU to select the suitable merger candidate, and also build0-1integer linear programming models for the determination of reorganizations alternatives.Chapter5studies the resource congestion problem which caused by the unreasonable allocation of resources. This chapter provides a DEA approach which can discriminate the congestion problem with desirable outputs and undesirable outputs, and then applies it to analyzing congestion of the industry in31administrative regions of China. Based on these findings, some political schemes are proposed to improve regional industrial efficiency.Internal resource waste refers to the waste in the intermediate resources between the upstream stage and downstream stage in a production or service system. This study examines the internal resource in a common two-stage system, in which the outputs from the first stage are taken as the inputs for the second stage. Two-stage structure systems can exist in centralized, decentralized, or mixed organizational modes. This chapter proposes two-stage DEA models considering a degree of centralization that can study the internal resource waste in different system modes.In a two-stage system with two sub-decision-making-units connected in series, fairly setting the target outputs for the first stage which are also the inputs for the second stage is critical for ensuring that the two stages have incentives to collaborate with each other in order to achieve the best performance of the whole system. In the last chapter, a new non-oriented envelopment DEA model taking account of fairness in the setting of the intermediate products is proposed. The fairness is interpreted based on the productivities of two divisions (stages) in the considered system when each division is viewed as an independent unit. Finally, this approach is illustrated by an empirical application to insurance companies.