Resilience of Operational Performance in China’s Insurance Companies: A Dynamic Data Envelopment Analysis

Abstract

In the rapidly changing business world, insurance companies should observe long-term operational performance and focus on its resilience. Existing studies rarely investigate the resilience issue of performance under the context of the insurance sector. Hence, this study develops a dynamic data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to measure the operational performance of insurance companies by considering multiple periods. Different from the existing works adopting traditional static DEA, our work develops a dynamic DEA model to estimate performance by incorporating multiple periods via a common objective function. Besides, the measurement for estimating the resilience of performance is further developed. The proposed approach in this study is applied to 25 Chinese insurance companies for three years from 2017 to 2019. The results reveal that most insurance companies’ performances still have improvement potential. And there exists a distinct difference in performance between property and casualty insurance companies and life insurance companies during the observed period. Additionally, the resilience of the performance of most inefficient insurance companies is at a weak level. Finally, some management implications are provided for improving operational performance.

Keywords

• Operational performance
• resilience
• insurance companies
• data envelopment analysis