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Far out or alone in the crowd: a taxonomy of peers in DEA

Abstract

A method is presented for classifying strongly efficient units in DEA as interior or exterior, and as self-evaluators or active peers. The exterior strongly efficient units are found by running the enveloping procedure “from below”. There is no firm production-function evidence of the efficiency of exterior self-evaluators. Interior self-evaluators are more likely to have active peers as neighbours in more directions and may therefore represent technology. When performing a second stage regression analysis of efficiency scores, exterior self-evaluators should be removed. The proportion of exterior active peers also provides information on whether the variable specification is supported by the data.

Category

Academic article

Language

English

Author(s)

  • Dag Fjeld Edvardsen
  • Finn R Førsund
  • Sverre A.C. Kittelsen

Affiliation

  • SINTEF
  • University of Oslo
  • Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research

Year

2008

Published in

Journal of Productivity Analysis

ISSN

0895-562X

Publisher

Springer

Volume

29

Issue

3

Page(s)

201 - 210

View this publication at Cristin