“…Thus, multistage models may be considered as special cases of network DEA models (see Färe & Grosskopf, 20 0 0 and Lewis & Sexton, 2004 for a brief review). A large number of previous research models has examined multistage DEA modeling in different areas, including banking, insurance, and healthcare (see for example Chilingerian & Sherman, 2011;Ebrahimnejad, Tavana, Lotfi, Shahverdi, & Yousefpour, 2014;Kao & Hwang, 2008;Matthews, 2013;Seiford & Zhu, 1999;Shyu & Chiang, 2012;Wang, Gopal, & Zionts, 1997 ). Although different variations of network DEA models have been proposed ( Kao, 2014 ), the vast majority of studies considers two-stages.…”