Supporting better decision-making: A combined grey model and data envelopment analysis for efficiency evaluation in e-commerce marketplaces

Abstract

E-commerce has become an integral part of businesses for decades in the modern world, and this has been exceptionally speeded up during the coronavirus era. To help businesses understand their current and future performance, which can help them survive and thrive in the world of e-commerce, this paper proposes a hybrid approach that conducts performance prediction and evaluation of the e-commerce industry by combining the Grey model, i.e., GM (1, 1) and data envelopment analysis, i.e., the Malmquist-I-C model. For each e-commerce company, GM (1, 1) is applied to predict future values for the period 2020–2022 and Malmquist-I-C is applied to calculate the efficiency score based on output variables such as revenue and gross profit and input variables such as assets, liabilities, and equity. The top 10 e-commerce companies in the US market are used to demonstrate model effectiveness. For the entire research period of 2016–2022, the most productive e-commerce marketplace on average was eBay, followed by Best Buy and Lowe’s; meanwhile, Groupon was the worst-performing e-commerce business during the studied period. Moreover, as most e-commerce companies have progressed in technological development, the results show that the determinants for productivity growth are the technical efficiency change indexes. That means, although focusing on technology development is the key to e-commerce success, companies should make better efforts to maximize their resources such as labor, material and equipment supplies, and capital. This paper offers decision-makers significant material for evaluating and improving their business performance.