The aim of this study is to investigate the performance measurement
and evaluation of European museums. Without ways to measure museums’
performance, museums will remain unaccountable in the current
world, that demands accountable results (Jacobsen, 2016). The performance
measurement of museums under investigation consists of financial
and personnel performance, although other performance indices
can be taken into account. The model consists of implementation of
Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach, that is used to measure
relative efficiency in these institutions. Several studies, some of them
quite recent, have employed various models to investigate the performance
of museums. DEA in particular has been used to evaluate a
group of institutions that employ different inputs to produce outputs
(Del Barrio and Herrero (2009, 2013), Fernández-Blanco, 2013). In
this work, we employ DEA, a methodological approach, to analyse
the efficiency of a homogeneous group of museums that use a series
of inputs (labour, expenditures) to achieve a set of outputs (visitors).
This method can help museums to compare their institution with their
peer, discover the gap in their resources or outputs and can be utilized
as a tool that shows that a museum is not performing as it should. In
our sample investigated, there are museums with sufficient inputs and
which are efficient in the outputs, whereas the less efficient ones could
be considered oversized in terms of resources utilized.