“…Although different models have been applied for the definition of a benchmarking frontier aiming, for instance, to measure energy efficiency (e.g., Oh & Hildreth, 2014;Otsuka & Goto, 2015) or to compare countries and regions in terms of performance (e.g., Afonso, Schuknecht, & Tanzi, 2005;Suzuki, Nijkamp, & Rietveld, 2011), the specific use of the DEA technique for the assessment of QoL in cities is scarce. To the authors' knowledge the few exceptions that used the DEA technique to assess QoL in cities are Morais and Camanho (2011) and Morais et al (2013), covering, respectively, 206 and 246 European cities.…”