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Data Envelopment Analysis: History, Models, and Interpretations

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Abstract

In about 30 years, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has grown into a powerful quantitative, analytical tool for measuring and evaluating the performance. DEA has been successfully applied to a host of many different types of entities engaged in a wide variety of activities in many contexts worldwide. This chapter discusses the basic DEA models and some of their extensions.

Part of the material in this chapter is adapted from the Journal of Econometrics, Vol. 46, Seiford, L.M. and Thrall, R.M., Recent developments in DEA: The mathematical programming approach to frontier analysis, 7–38, 1990, with permission from Elsevier Science.

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Cooper, W.W., Seiford, L.M., Zhu, J. (2011). Data Envelopment Analysis: History, Models, and Interpretations. In: Cooper, W., Seiford, L., Zhu, J. (eds) Handbook on Data Envelopment Analysis. International Series in Operations Research & Management Science, vol 164. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6151-8_1

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