DEA Cobb–Douglas frontier and cross-efficiency

The current paper examines the cross-efficiency concept in data envelopment analysis (DEA). While cross-efficiency has appeal as a peer evaluation approach, it is often the subject of criticism, due mainly to the use of DEA weights that are often non-unique. As a result, cross-efficiency scores are routinely viewed as arbitrary in that they depend on a particular set of optimal DEA weights generated by the computer code in use at the time. While imposing secondary goals can reduce the variability of cross-efficiency scores, such approaches do not completely solve the problem of non-uniqueness, and meaningful secondary goals can lead to computationally intractable non-linear programs. The current paper proposes to use the units-invariant multiplicative DEA model to calculate the cross-efficiency scores. This allows one to calculate the maximum cross-efficiency score for each DMU in a converted linear model, and eliminates the need for imposing secondary goals.