A new DEA approach to fully rank DMUs with an application to MBA programs

Abstract

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) can be used to evaluate the efficiencies of decision‐making units (DMUs) in various areas like education, healthcare, and energy. Several DEA methods are proposed for this purpose; however, some of these methods cannot provide a full ranking and others often overlook some considerations that arise with special characteristics of DMUs. We propose a new DEA‐based approach to achieve a full ranking of DMUs. Our approach takes various issues into account such as the initial efficiency score of the DMU, the DMUs that should be removed from the set for it to become efficient (if any) and its effects on the efficiency scores of other DMUs. We demonstrate the shortcomings of several other DEA methods and discuss how our approach overcomes these. We apply our approach to evaluate 50 MBA programs from Financial Times 2018 rankings and compare the results with the evaluations of other methods. As opposed to some methods, our approach has the advantage of differentiating between all efficient DMUs as well as inefficient ones. In addition, the results demonstrate that we can achieve a consistent ranking that considers different aspects of the problem setting. The generated scores are also used to sort DMUs in classes of preference.

Classification of industrial engineering programs in Colombia based on state tests

“…Johnes & Li [ 37 ] determine the efficiency of research outputs for 109 universities in China using as input variables personnel (administrative and professors), students, economic and bibliographic resources to measure the impact they have on the output variables which are the different research outputs. Ekiz & Tuncer [ 38 ] evaluate 50 MBA programs from Financial Times 2018 rankings and compare the results with the evaluations of other methods. Singh et al [ 39 ] consider 61 educational institutions of India to rank them according to their performances, the ranking is done based on the efficiency scores of the institutions.…”

Measuring the overall efficiency of SRI and conventional mutual funds by a diversification‐consistent DEA model

“…(1978) as a nonparametric technology to measure empirically the productive efficiency of a set of decision‐making units. Although DEA has a strong link to production theory, over the years, it has also been applied to different areas of research (finance, marketing, agriculture, energy, tourism, education, health, sport, among others) (Emrouznejad et al., 2008; Babalos et al., 2012, 2015; Zhu, 2016; De Witte et al., 2020; Ekiz and Tuncer Şakar, 2020; Lim et al., 2022; Ruiz and Sirvent, 2020, and references therein). In this paper, we have focused on the financial framework, more specifically we propose to assess the relative financial and nonfinancial efficiency of mutual funds (MFs) using DEA models.…”