Robustness of efficiency scores in data envelopment analysis with interval scale data

Abstract

Our paper focuses on a robustness analysis of efficiency scores in the context of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) assuming interval scale data, as defined in A. Dehnokhalaji, P. J. Korhonen, M. Köksalan, N. Nasrabadi and J. Wallenius, “Efficiency Analysis to incorporate interval scale data”, European Journal of Operational Research 207 (2), 2010, pp. 1116–1121. We first show that the definition of the efficiency score used in our paper is a well-defined measure according to Aparicio and Pastor (J. Aparicio and J. T. Pastor, “A well-defined efficiency measure for dealing with closest targets in DEA”, Applied Mathematics and Computation 219 (17), 2013, pp. 9142–9154.). Next, we characterize how robust the efficiency scores are with respect to improvements and deteriorations of inputs and outputs. We illustrate our analysis with two examples: a simple numerical example and a more complex example using real-world data.