An enhanced DEA Russell graph efficiency measure

The measurement of productive efficiency is an issue of great interest. Since Farrell (Farrell, M.J., 1957. Journal of Royal Statistical Society, Series A 120, 253) implemented the first measure of technical efficiency, many researchers have developed new measures or have extended the already existing ones. The beginning of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) meant a new way of empirically measuring productive efficiency. Under some specific technologies, Farrell's measure was implemented giving rise to the first DEA models, CCR (Charnes, A., Cooper, W.W., Rhodes, E., 1978. European Journal of Operational Research 2, 429) and BCC (Banker, R.D., Charnes, A., Cooper, W.W.,1984. Management Science, 1078). The fact that these measures only account for radial inefficiency has motivated the development of the so-called Global Efficiency Measures (GEMs) (Cooper, W.W., Pastor, J.T., 1995. Working Paper, Departamento de Estadistica e Investigacion Operative, Universidad de Alicante, Alicante, Spain). In this paper we propose a new GEM inspired by the Russell Graph Measure of Technical Efficiency which avoids the computational and interpretative difficulties with this latter measure. Additionally, the new measure satisfies some other desirable properties. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.