A parameter-free approach for estimating the quality and quantity of the right and left returns to scale in Data Envelopment Analysis

One of the concepts that has gained important attention from economic and management-science research is that of the concept of returns to scale (RTS). There are several research papers on the behavior of the right and left RTS, as two specific directions of RTS, based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models. However, the main weakness of most of these methods is that they are based on the defined parameters, which itself leads to a high sensitivity of the models to variations in the magnitudes of the parameters and, thus, unreliable results. In this paper, we specially address this issue and propose a simple procedure for detecting the right and left RTS classification with an important feature that is independent of any predetermined parameters. In addition to the type of RTS, we also suggest a method to determine the value of the right and left RTS corresponding to each of the efficient DMUs. Finally, the superiority of the proposed parameter-free procedure over a parameter-based methods is elaborated by a real case in the banking system. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.