Partial input to output impacts in DEA: The case of DMU-specific impacts

Raha Imanirad, Wade D. Cook, Sonia Valeria Aviles-Sacoto and Joe Zhu

European Journal of Operational Research, 2015, vol. 244, issue 3, 837-844

Abstract: Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a methodology for evaluating the relative efficiencies of a set of decision-making units (DMUs). The original model is based on the assumption that in a multiple input, multiple output setting, all inputs impact all outputs. In many situations, however, this assumption may not apply, such as would be the case in manufacturing environments where some products may require painting while others would not. In earlier work by the authors, the conventional DEA methodology was extended to allow for efficiency measurement in such situations where partial input-to-output interactions exist. In that methodology all DMUs have identical input/output profiles. It is often the case, however, that these profiles can be different for some DMUs than is true of others. This phenomenon can be prevalent, for example, in manufacturing settings where some plants may use robots for spot welding while other plants may use human resources for that task. Consider a highway maintenance application where consulting services for safety corrections may not be employed on low traffic roadways, but are commonly used on high traffic, multilane highways. Thus, input to output links in the case of some DMUs are missing in the case of others. To address this, the current paper extends the methodology presented earlier by the authors to allow for efficiency measurement in situations where some DMUs have different input/output profiles than is true of others. The new methodology is then applied to the problem of evaluating the efficiencies of a set of road maintenance patrols.

Keywords: DEA; Partial impacts; DMU specific impacts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221715000818
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:244:y:2015:i:3:p:837-844

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2015.02.002

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 ().