A quantitative approach to evaluate the relative efficiency of museums

Data Envelopment Analysis is used for evaluating the technical efficiency of museum institutions. This approach enables us to create for each museum a relative efficiency measure, which takes into account both the resources used by museums and the results of their activities. Moreover this technique is able to overcome some of the difficulties found when applying more traditional indicators of productivity in evaluating the technical efficiency of cultural institutions. An empirical analysis carried out on data from Italian municipal museums illustrates this application of the operational research model.