Considering the financial ratios on the performance evaluation of highway bus industry

This paper tries to construct a performance evaluation procedure for highwa y buses with the financial ratio taken into consideration. First, a concept ual framework is redeveloped, based on the one created by Fielding et al., to help form evaluation items and performance indicators involving both tra nsport and finance aspects. Second, the total performance is divided into t hree major kinds of efficiency-production, marketing, execution-according t o the cycle of operation activities. Third, to overcome the problems of sma ll sample size and unknown distribution of samples, the grey relation analy sis is used to select the representative indicators, and the TOPSIS method is used for the outranking of highway bus. In addition, a case study is con ducted using four highway bus companies as example. The empirical result sh ows that the performance evaluation for highway buses could become more com prehensive if financial ratios are considered.