 Efficiency analysis with ratio measuresOle Bent Olesen, Niels Christian Petersen and Victor V. Podinovski European Journal of Operational Research, 2015, vol. 245, issue 2, 446-462 Abstract: In applications of data envelopment analysis (DEA) data about some inputs and outputs is often available only in the form of ratios such as averages and percentages. In this paper we provide a positive answer to the long-standing debate as to whether such data could be used in DEA. The problem arises from the fact that ratio measures generally do not satisfy the standard production assumptions, e.g., that the technology is a convex set. Our approach is based on the formulation of new production assumptions that explicitly account for ratio measures. This leads to the estimation of production technologies under variable and constant returns-to-scale assumptions in which both volume and ratio measures are native types of data. The resulting DEA models allow the use of ratio measures “as is”, without any transformation or use of the underlying volume measures. This provides theoretical foundations for the use of DEA in applications where important data are reported in the form of ratios. Keywords: Data envelopment analysis; Technology; Production assumptions; Efficiency; Ratio measures (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:245:y:2015:i:2:p:446-462 DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2015.03.013 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 |
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