An application of statistical interference in DEA models: An analysis of public owned university departments' efficiency

This paper uses Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model formulations in order to determine the performance levels of 16 departments of the University of Thessaly. Particularly, the constant returns to scale (CRS) and variable returns to scale (VRS) models have been applied alongside with bootstrap techniques in order to determine accurate performance measurements of the 16 departments. The study illustrates how the recent developments in efficiency analysis and statistical inference can be applied when evaluating institutional performance issues. The paper provides the efficient departments and the target values which need to be adopted from the inefficient departments in order to operate in the most productive scale size (MPSS). Moreover it provides bias corrected estimates alongside with their confidence intervals. The analysis indicates that there are strong inefficiencies among the departments, emphasizing the misallocation of resources or/and inefficient application of departments policy developments.University efficiency; DEA; Bootstrap techniques; Kernel density estimation, Economic research; Europe; University rankings.

Weight assurance region in two-stage additive efficiency decomposition DEA model:an application to school data

In this paper we use the additive efficiency decomposition approach in two-stage data envelopment analysis. Initially, we evaluate the variable returns to scale version and face a structural difficulty of the model. In an extreme case, weights xi(1) or xi(2) which represent the relative importance of the performance of the first and second stages, respectively, become zero for a number of decision making units (DMUs). As a result, individual stage efficiencies for these DMUs are undefined. We propose a weight assurance region model to restrict xi(1) and xi(2), which ensures that both weights are always positive, and therefore individual stage efficiency is always defined. Furthermore, the proposed model is appropriate for policy making in the presence of a priori information about the relative importance of each stage in the overall process. We employ the new model to evaluate the efficiency of secondary education in 65 countries and construct an overall 'school efficiency' index. In the first stage we measure the 'learning environment efficiency' and in the second we measure the 'student's performance efficiency'