A Note on Imposing Strong Complementary Slackness Conditions in DEA

Last ned memo

A new DEA model has been introduced recently combining the primal and the dual models in order to impose strong complementary slackness conditions. It was claimed that a reference set that contains the maximum number of efficient units can then be determined. The model is very interesting as a theoretical idea. However, not only does the computational burden increase significantly, but it seems also that the basic matrices may be inherently ill-conditioned, leading to wrong results. Numerical experiments have been carried out on two real datasets of medium size with 163 and 920 units. These experiments show pervasive existence of ill-conditioned matrices leading to obviously wrong estimates of efficiency scores, and units declared as efficient reference units while actually being inefficient.