Attempts can be found in the DEA literature to identify returns to scale at efficient interior points of the production possibility set on the basis of returns to scale at points of the corresponding reference sets. However, an opposite approach is put forward in this paper, advocating that...

Measuring productive efficiency is an important research strand within fields of economics, management science and operations research. One definition of efficiency is the proportional scaling needed for observations of an inefficient unit to be projected onto an efficient production function...

A new DEA model has been introduced recently combining the primal and the dual models in order to impose strong complementary slackness conditions. It was claimed that a reference set that contains the maximum number of efficient units can then be determined. The model is very interesting as a...

Attempts can be found in the DEA literature to identify returns to scale at efficient interior points of the production possibility set on the basis of returns to scale at points of the corresponding reference sets. However, an opposite approach is put forward in this paper, advocating that...

Some models are presented in this paper which extend the concept of measuring superefficiency to the useful case of variable returns-to-scales (VRS), thus enabling the ranking of efficient as well as inefficient units. Two models, namely the Universal Radial Model and the Universal Additive...

Applications of the DEA models show that inadequate results may arise in some cases, two of these inadequacies being: a) too many efficient units may appear in some DEA models; b) a DEA model may show an inefficient unit from the point of view of experts as an efficient one. The purpose of this...

Some inadequate results may appear in the DEA models as in any other mathematical model. In the DEA scientific literature several methods were proposed to deal with these difficulties. In our previous paper, we introduced the notion of terminal units. It was also substantiated that only terminal...

Due to the advancing economisation and the associated discussion on the distribution of public budgets and tax revenues, the efficiency of higher education institutions is increasingly coming into focus. Since the 2000s, more and more studies on the efficiency of German universities have been...

When benchmarking production units by non-parametric methods like data envelopment analysis (DEA), an assumption has to be made about the returns to scale of the underlying technology. Moreover, it is often also relevant to compare the frontiers across samples of producers. Until now, no exact...

Gender equality has been one of the goals of the European Union since 1957. Article 157 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union authorizes the European Parliament and the Council to adopt all those measures that guarantee the application of the principle of equality opportunities...