Performance evaluation of participating nations at the 2012 London Summer Olympics by a two-stage data envelopment analysis

Yongjun Li, Xiyang Lei, Qianzhi Dai and Liang Liang

European Journal of Operational Research, 2015, vol. 243, issue 3, 964-973

Abstract: This study measures the performance of participating nations at the Olympics, considering the quest for medals as a two-stage Olympic process. The first stage is characterized as athlete preparation (AP) and the second stage as athlete competition (AC). We extend the relational model from the constant returns to scale framework to the variable returns to scale version. The efficiency of each participating nation in the entire two-stage Olympic process is calculated as a product of the efficiencies of both stages, and a heuristic search is applied to the extended relational model. The efficiency of each stage can be obtained and directions for improving the performance of participating nations in the two-stage Olympic process can be identified. An empirical study of the 2012 London Summer Olympic Games reveals that the efficiency of the AP stage is higher than that of the AC stage for the majority of participants. In addition, a plot of the relationship between these three efficiencies shows that the efficiency of the entire two-stage Olympic process is more significantly related to that of the AC stage than that of the AP stage.

Keywords: Data envelopment analysis; Two-stage process; Performance evaluation; Heuristic search procedure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221714010509
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:243:y:2015:i:3:p:964-973

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2014.12.032

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 ().