Composite indicators are regularly used for benchmarking countries’ performance, but equally often stir controversies about the unavoidable subjectivity that is connected with their construction. Data Envelopment Analysis helps to overcome some key limitations, viz., the undesirable dependence...

This paper focuses on the construction of a composite indicator for the knowledge based economy using imprecise data. Specifically, for some indicators we only have information on the bounds of the interval within which the true value is believed to lie. The proposed approach is based on a...

The non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis approach is increasingly used to construct composite indicators for country performance monitoring, benchmarking, and policy evaluation in a large variety of fields. The flexibility in the definition of aggregation weights is praised as the method's...

This paper proposes an adjusted version of the popular efficiency measurement technique Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) that makes it possible (1) to evaluate the cost efficiency of municipalities in the collection and processing of multiple household waste fractions, (2) robustifying the cost...

This paper proposed an adjusted “shared-input” version of the popular efficiency measurement technique Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) that enables evaluating municipality waste collection and processing performances in settings in which one input (waste costs) is shared among treatment...

This paper proposes a non-parametric methodology to construct composite scores of citizen satisfaction with local police corpses. More precisely, the paper advocates a custom made version of the popular Data Envelopment Analysis approach, also referred to as the ‘Benefit-of-the-Doubt’-model....

Students' evaluations of teacher performance (SETs) are increasingly used by universities. However, in their current format SET-scores are controversial mainly due to two issues: (1) questionnaire items are relegated to the status of being of equal importance, and (2) the feedback to the...

Although benevolent (BoD) weighting has some appealing features for the construction of evaluation scores of teacher performance (i.e., SET-scores), it still suffers from an important drawback in its basic form: the sensitivity of its outcomes to the influence of potential outliers, extreme...

Hard data alone are not sufficient to evaluate local police effectiveness in the new age of community policing. Citizens can provide useful feedback regarding strengths and weaknesses of police operations. However, citizen satisfaction indicators typically fail to accurately convey the...