Analysis of U.S. Port Efficiency Using Double-Bootstrapped DEA

Due to increased competition in supply side to reduce operational costs, port professionals have experienced extreme pressure, which demanded academicians to develop the model for efficientport operations from the industry perspective. Among many ports in the world, U.S. ports are our primary interest to analyze in our study for its high volume of cargoes transacted in the U.S.
ports. We primarily employed DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) technique to research the productivity of U.S. ports and applied the algorithm of double bootstrapped DEA proposed by Simar& Wilson (2007) to further investigate the driving forces of the performance of U.S. port operations. The external variables employed in our study comprise onDock Rail, Channel Depth,Location, Area, Acres, ForeignCargoRatio, and TEUChange, out of which onDock Rail, Acres, ForeignCargoRatio, and TEUChange were significant. In order to evaluate the effects of methodologyselection, we conducted the same analysis applying the Censored model (Tobit) and contrasted the outcomes drawn from the two different techniques. Based on the findings from this work we proposed managerial implications and concluded.