Reexamining the Efficiency of Chinese Commercial Banks Using a Novel Two‐Stage General Equilibrium Efficient Frontier <scp>DEA</scp> Approach With Fixed‐Sum Intermediate Measures

ABSTRACT Measuring and improving the efficiency of commercial banks is crucial for promoting the high‐quality development of the banking industry. Bank operations can be divided into a sequential, two‐stage process consisting of a deposit collection stage and a profit earning stage, with deposits as an intermediate measure. Deposits are a limited resource for which banks compete, exhibiting a fixed‐sum characteristic, which must be considered when measuring bank efficiency. To this end, based on the noncooperative game mechanism, we propose a novel two‐stage general equilibrium efficient frontier data envelopment analysis (GEEFDEA) approach considering fixed‐sum intermediate measures. We then apply the model to measure the deposit collection efficiency, profit earning efficiency, and overall efficiency of 56 listed Chinese commercial banks from 2017 to 2023. Further, we employ a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) approach to explore the paths leading to high bank efficiency from a configurational perspective. This study finds that when deposit collection takes priority, 44 banks had an overall efficiency below 1 during the study period, with a deposit collection efficiency of 1.1216 and a profit earning efficiency of 0.7901. When the profit earning stage takes priority, 42 banks achieved an efficiency above 1. The deposit collection efficiency (0.3671) is much worse than the profit earning efficiency (2.8612). Additionally, the configuration analysis shows that high bank efficiency results from the synergistic effects of condition variables. Finally, theoretical and practical implications are discussed.