Application of Data Envelopment Analysis for pharmaceutical export decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Decision-making in complex systems is undoubtedly quite difficult, mostly under exceptional circumstances. Indeed, in the context of international market selection, the COVID-19 pandemic has made pharmaceutical export decisions more complex. Several scientific approaches are used by researchers as well as practitioners to guide in this area. In particular, Operations Research techniques, including linear programming, discrete event simulation and queuing theory, are called by organizational leaders to make highquality decisions. This study presents a Benchmarking methodology to support the decision-making process for international market selection based on the Data Envelopment Analysis method. A computational numerical study was conducted to highlight the performance of the proposed approach.