The concept “Data Envelopment Analysis” (DEA) was introduced in the journal literature by the highly influential 1978 paper of Charnes, Cooper, and Rhodes. In the subsequent literature the development of research leading up to this paper tended to be forgotten. However, studying this...

The field of theoretical and applied efficiency analysis is pursued both by economists and people from operational research and management science. Each group tends to cite a different paper as the seminal one. Recent availability of electronically accessible databases of journal articles makes...