A Unified Mathematical Model for Stochastic Data Envelopment Analysis

Abstract

Efficiency measurement is one aspect of organizational performance that managers are usually interested in determining. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a powerful quantitative tool that provides a means to obtain useful information about the efficiency and performance of organizations and all sorts of functionally similar, relatively autonomous operating units. DEA models are either with a constant rate of return (CRS) or variable return to scale (VRS). Furthermore, the models could be input-oriented or output-oriented. In many real-life applications, observations are usually random in nature; as a result, DEA efficiency measurement may be sensitive to such variations. The purpose of this study was to develop a unified stochastic DEA model that handles different natures of variables independently (random and deterministic) and can be adapted to model both input/output-oriented problems, whether it is CRS or VRS. The chance-constrained approach was adopted to handle the stochastic variables that exist in the model. The developed model is implemented through an illustrative example.