ABSTRACT
Performance determines a company's survival in the long term (Anderson et al., 2000). Consequently, performance measurement is crucial for management. Among the techniques of performance evaluation, ratio analysis is probably the most used in practice with ratios such as EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) margin, operating margin, assets turnover, return on assets, return on capital employed, return on investment, return on sales, and return on equity. More recently, economic value added (Stewart, 1991) emerged as a measure related to the management goal of creating shareholder value, and the balanced scorecard (Kaplan and Norton, 1992) has been established as a requirement for linking multidimensional managerial decisions to the implementation of the strategy of the firm. Many authors emphasize a firm's need to reflect a multidimensional nature of management in performance evaluation (Anthony and Govindarajan, 2003; Kaplan and Norton, 1993; Zhu, 2000; Reynolds, 2003; Phillips, 1999a,b; Avkiran, 2002). However, the weighting of multifactor models to generate a single indicator of performance is a problem derived by its subjectivism, which is a constraint for its utilization in practice.
