Economic difficulties such as high inflation, deep recession and austerity are disastrous for any country. Monitoring and analysis of every economic activity is necessary to prevent such a scenario. The cost-effectiveness (CE) analysis yields an optimal evaluation of economic activity, which emphasises using minimum resources. Numerous techniques are employed to assess cost-effectiveness; however, none apply to internal organisational structures regarding the operational performance metrics of a company. Therefore, this paper presents a new method using data envelopment analysis to measure CE in a two-stage network system so that all outputs of the first stage are used as inputs of the second stage to produce final outputs. We have concluded that the units that display cost-effectiveness are cost-efficiency. Finally, an example elaborates applicability and merits of the proposed method.
Saljooghi et al. (2026) studied this question.