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In this paper, we examine the comparative of higher education institutions in the UK. The governmental inititatives of the decade within this sector have given emphasis to issues of accountability, value for money and cost control. The reporting of various statistics regarding the universities' activities only fully achieves its potential value if it is used to define comprehensive concepts of performance and goal achievements informed by the institutions' missions. In that spirit, we propose concepts of cost and outcome efficiency in order to gain further insights into the universities' operations. Data envelopment analysis and its recent advances were used to asses the two types of efficiency. The application of the methodology to 45 universities in the UK revealed a subset of six institutions that showed satisfactory performance across alternative efficiency tests.

This paper discusses a number of applications of data envelopment analysis and the nature of uncertainty in those applications. It then reviews the key approaches to handling uncertainty in data envelopment analysis (DEA) (imprecise DEA, bootstrapping, Monte Carlo simulation and chance constrained DEA) and considers their suitability for modelling the applications. The paper concludes with suggestions about the challenges facing an operational research analyst in applying DEA in real-world situations. Journal of the Operational Research Society (2010) 61, 25-34. doi:10.1057/jors.2009.14

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