The US motor carrier industry: estimation of operational efficiency using DEA

In this paper, a performance analysis of the US motor carriers is carried out from the perspectives of a shipper and a motor carrier. Various efficiency measures are estimated using Data Envelopment Analyses (DEAs) with publicly available financial data on a representative sample of 21 publicly listed motor carriers. The analysis reveals that the average efficiencies of US motor carriers have gradually increased during the study period; however, a majority of the carriers are scale‐inefficient, which demonstrates potential savings through benchmarking input targets.