An ethics-based decomposition of Malmquist productivity index using data envelopment analysis

Productivity growth and efficiency improvements are the major sources of economic development. Pure efficiency, scale efficiency, and technology are basic factors, and rules and regulations and balance are recently known factors affecting the Malmquist productivity index. The index is the most common productivity growth index that uses data envelopment analysis models over multiple time periods. In this paper, we focus on the effect of the ethics factor in the decomposition of Malmquist productivity change index at the bank branch level by first developing an ethics model using some ethical codes and then calculating the ethics factor of decision making units. The ethics model uses weight restrictions for the constant returns to scale technologies to increase discrimination power of basic data envelopment analysis models. Then, the proposed ethics model is applied to a sample of 41 commercial bank branches and the results for both traditional and extended Malmquist index are analyzed.