A Dea-Malmquist Approach to Evaluate Efficiency in the Performing Arts: Focus on German and Italian Opera Houses

The study aims at evaluating the efficiency of opera houses by using a quantitative approach that takes into account both the internal managerial inefficiency, related to a non optimal use of resources in producing cultural output, and the component of efficiency that could be ascribed to the external environment in which an opera house works. To this purpose, we consider the opera houses operating in two different countries and use models based on the operations research technique data envelopment analysis (DEA) to measure efficiency within each group and across groups. Technical and scale efficiencies are also computed as parts of internal efficiency. Some determinants of productivity growth in the performing art sector are investigated by defining a convenient decomposition of Malmquist index which captures the sources of productivity changes with reference to a global efficiency frontier. An empirical analysis carried out on German and Italian opera houses shows the direct applicability of the approach to real cases.