Int. J. Operational Research, Vol. 27, Nos. 1/2, 2016 275 Copyright © 2016 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Relative efficiency of hardware retail stores chains in Canada Pawoumodom Matthias Takouda* and Mohamed Dia Faculty of Management, School of Commerce and Administration, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario P3E 2C6, Canada Email: mtakouda@laurentian.ca Email: mdia@laurentian.ca *Corresponding author Abstract: The Canadian hardware and renovation products’ retail market is dominated by four chains of retail stores, one of whom is private. We use data envelopment analysis to evaluate and study the relative efficiency of the three public chains during the decade 2000 to 2010. Our findings show the firms have been impacted in diverse ways by the latest crisis in North America: the 2005 to 2006 collapse of the USA housing bubble, the 2007 crisis in the Canadian forest industry, and the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. In addition, the findings illustrate some of the dynamics within the hardware retail sector and throw light upon the sector in the recent years. Keywords: technical efficiency; scale efficiency; data envelopment analysis; DEA; hardware retail stores; Canada. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Takouda, P.M. and Dia, M. (2016) ‘Relative efficiency of hardware retail stores chains in Canada’, Int. J. Operational Research, Vol. 27, Nos. 1/2, pp.275–290. Biographical notes: Pawoumodom Matthias Takouda is an Assistant Professor of Quantitative Methods and Operations Management at the School of Commerce and Administration of the Faculty of Management of the Laurentian University. He received his PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University Paul Sabatier-Toulouse III, France and has been a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton as well as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Management Sciences of the University of Waterloo, Canada and at the School of Management of the University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada. His research focuses on the multicriteria decision aid, projections algorithms, linear/conic/semidefinite optimisation, data envelopment analysis, transportation algorithms and in the applications of these techniques in portfolio selection, facility layout, VLSI design and supply chain management. Mohamed Dia is a Full Professor of Quantitative Methods at the School of Commerce and Administration of the Faculty of Management of the Laurentian University. He received his PhD in Management Science from the Business School of Tunis, and has been a Postdoctorant at the Telfer School of Management of the University of Ottawa and at the University of Quebec at Montreal. His research focuses on the multicriteria decision aid, data envelopment analysis, fuzzy sets theory, and in the applications of these techniques in corporate finance, risk management, and portfolio selection.