Asian nations’ metafrontier analysis and strategic performance management in mega sports events.

Introduction: The Olympic and Paralympic Games were delayed until 2021 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the spirit and strength of these mega sports events should continue, and the world's nations have an important influence on the sports world. This study aimed to examine and quantify the gap in Olympic efficiency, as projected by the group frontier and metafrontier, through data envelopment analysis and metafrontier approaches. Using both frontiers, we simultaneously conducted an objective analysis based on general and specific nations. Methods: We developed a systematic strategic performance management system to evaluate 85 nations’ efficiency globally and to analyze the tendencies exhibited by the efficiencies and gaps among eight Asian nations that regularly participated in eight consecutive Olympic and Paralympic Games from 1992 to 2020. Results: We indicated that the group frontier approach provides better differentiation power for Asian nations with low efficiencies. The metafrontier analysis, however, demonstrated salient discrimination against Asian nations with superior efficiencies. Conclusion: Through long-term tracking, the efficiency and sustainable strategies of seven Asian nations were shown. China, Japan, and Chinese Taipei show upward trends, a sustainable social capital strategy in sports, and strength. We also discussed several attributes emerging from these results of host nations’ positive influence, the feature sport, and female athletes’ power. For Asian nations, we demonstrated four types of sustainable efficiency improvement in the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]