Evaluating Top Services-Prepackaged Software Firms in Standard and Poor's 500 Index by Using a Multiple Objective Programming Based Data Envelopment Analysis

Services-prepackaged software firms are a field of Information technology (IT). IT is defined as the obtainment, procedure, storage and propagation of sounding, drawing, and textual information by combining microelectronics-based computing and telecommunications. Nowadays, IT has penetrated in daily life of human beings and become one part of the whole society. The importance of IT has become momentous. Therefore, to understand the performance of efficiency and productivity of the IT firms is critical for managers as well as for personal investors. Until now, there are very few researches tried to analyze final performance of the services-prepackaged software firms in IT sector. As a result, this research intends to use traditional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) CCR or BCC models to evaluate the performance of the services-prepackaged software firms. However, the traditional DEA models are not fair models from the aspect of improper weight derivations. Thus, this paper intends to analyze the efficiency of the servicesprepackaged software firms by using multiple objective programming (MOP) based DEA. The Decision Making Units (DMUs) on this research are chosen from the services-prepackaged software firms in S&P 500 based on publicly available financial reports of the fiscal year 2010. In a MOP based DEA approach, DMUs will be evaluated based on an equal standard and the results will be evaluated more fairly. In the empirical study, the MOP based DEA demonstrated that Autodesk Inc., BMC Software, and Citrix Systems should be the services-prepackaged software firms worthwhile to be invested. In the future, performance evaluation results can be served as foundations for investment strategies definition.