Employing super-efficiency analysis as an alternative to DEA: An application in outpatient substance abuse treatment

Tammie A. Nahra, David Mendez and Jeffrey A. Alexander

European Journal of Operational Research, 2009, vol. 196, issue 3, 1097-1106

Abstract: A common technique for conducting efficiency analyses consists of a two-stage procedure that combines data envelopment analysis (DEA) with Tobit regression. As the DEA scores are censored at one, this method has the drawback of masking important information at the upper tail of the distribution of scores. In this paper, we present a DEA-based methodology for a two-stage efficiency analysis where the upper bound constraint of one for the efficiency scores is relaxed. This method, super-efficiency DEA, is contrasted with the two-stage approach that employs traditional, bounded DEA scores. We use data from the National Drug Abuse Treatment Survey to examine how the relative efficiency of the treatment units is affected by the organizational structures, operating characteristics and treatment modalities of a nationally representative sample of outpatient substance abuse treatment units. Our results show that the super-efficiency DEA approach offers advantages over the traditional methodology. It is easy to implement, and, for the same sample size provides more information.

Keywords: Efficiency; Super-efficiency; DEA; Tobit; regression; Substance; abuse (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377-2217(08)00378-0
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:196:y:2009:i:3:p:1097-1106

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().