“…Since its seminal work in Charnes et al (1978) and Banker et al (1984), the DEA methodology has attracted more and more attention from scholars all over the world, and the DEA methodology and its applications have been extensively studied in the literature (Emrouznejad, 2014;Emrouznejad & Yang, 2018). On the application aspect, the literature has witnessed DEA-based approaches in different areas from public sector such as universities, hospitals, sports, and disaster relief operations to private sector such as banks, supply chains, manufacturing industries, and mergers and acquisitions (An, Meng, Ang, & Chen, 2018;Li, Liang, Li, & Emrouznejad, 2018a;Li, Zhu, & Zhuang, 2018e). On the methodology aspect, many innovative concepts and models have been proposed to extend and enrich the DEA theory.…”