Super-Efficiency and Sensitivity Analysis in DEA for the Case of Exogenously Fixed Inputs

This paper reports on a study of the use of super-efficiency approach in data envelopment analysis (DEA) sensitivity analysis for the case of “exogenously fixed” factors. This issue is important since in any realistic situation there may exist exogenously fixed or non-discretionary factors that are beyond the control of a DMU’s management, which also need to be considered. When a DMU under evaluation is not included in the reference set of the original DEA models, the resulting DEA models are called super-efficiency DEA models. In this paper, by means of the modified Banker and Morey’s (BM hereafter) model [2], in which the test DMU is excluded from the reference set, we show that super-efficiency score can be decomposed into two data perturbation components of a particular test frontier decision making unit (DMU) and the remaining DMUs. As a result, we are able to determine what perturbations of discretionary data can be tolerated before frontier DMUs become nonfrontier.