Haian Yu, Zufeng Shang, Fenglai Wang
Benchmarking contractor competitiveness remains challenging because competitiveness is multidimensional and involves the process through which firms transform conduct-related capabilities into competitive performance. Existing studies on Overall Competitiveness Efficiency (OCE) based on Porter’s Five Forces mainly rely on static equal-weight aggregation, which provides limited insight into how upstream conduct-related capabilities are converted into downstream competitive performance. To address this gap, this study reconstructs OCE under the Structure, Conduct and Performance (SCP) paradigm as a serial process of conduct-related capability generation and performance transformation. The proposed framework is operationalized through a two-stage network super-efficiency Benefit of the Doubt Data Envelopment Analysis (BoD-DEA) model, which endogenizes indicator weights and provides diagnostic results at the overall, stage and dimension levels. Using data from 27 construction contractors operating in Saudi Arabia, the results show that the proposed network OCE yields a sample mean of 0.569, compared with 0.678 for the conventional equal-weight index. This difference suggests that static aggregation may obscure stage-specific inefficiencies under full compensability. The stage-level results reveal a mean normalized upstream capability performance score of 0.862 and a mean performance-transformation efficiency score of 0.663, indicating that the main bottleneck is associated with transforming upstream conduct-related capabilities into downstream competitive performance. Projection-based diagnostics further identify firm-specific bottlenecks along this two-stage process. The reconstructed OCE measure distinguishes normalized upstream capability performance from performance transformation and provides a process-oriented benchmarking tool grounded in the SCP paradigm for evaluating contractor competitiveness.