Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a linear programming methodology to evaluate the relative technical efficiency for each member of a set of peer decision making units (DMUs) with multiple inputs and multiple outputs. It has been widely used to measure performance in many areas. A weakness of...

Pesticides’ dynamic effects and production uncertainty play an important role in farmers’ production decisions. Pesticides have a current production impact through reducing crop damage in the current period and a future impact through impacting the farm biodiversity which alters the future...

Conventional data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods assume that input and output variables are continuous. However, in many real managerial cases, some inputs and/or outputs can only take integer values. Simply rounding the performance targets to the nearest integers can lead to misleading...

In a Data Envelopment Analysis model, some of the weights used to compute the efficiency of a unit can have zero or negligible value despite of the importance of the corresponding input or output. This paper offers an approach to preventing inputs and outputs from being ignored in the DEA...

What might be the relation between clinical research and efficiency of medical care suppliers? Is the hypothesis of a positive relation consistent? Considering efficiency as the supplier’s ability to maximize the number of patients hospitalized in a mobility process among regions (i.e....

Newly-developed data envelopment analysis techniques permit simultaneous consideration of ‘good and bad’ outputs in evaluating efficiency. We use these techniques to determine joint ecological and technical efficiencies of the 437 largest fossil-fueled electricity-generating plants in the...

This paper develops theory missing in the sizable literature that uses data envelopment analysis to construct return–risk ratios for investment funds. It explores the production possibility set of the investment funds to identify an appropriate form of returns to scale. It discusses what risk...

This paper proposes a two-dimensional efficiency decomposition (2DED) of profitability for a production system to account for the demand effect observed in productivity analysis. The first dimension identifies four components of efficiency: capacity design, demand generation, operations, and...

Highly deteriorated US road infrastructure, major budgetary restrictions and the significant growth in traffic have led to an emerging need for improving performance of highway maintenance practices. Privatizing some portions of road maintenance operations by state Departments of Transportation...

We propose new efficiency tests which are based on traditional DEA models and take into account portfolio diversification. The goal is to identify the investment opportunities that perform well without specifying our attitude to risk. We use general deviation measures as the inputs and return...