Practical common weights MOLP approach for efficiency analysis

A characteristic of data envelopment analysis (DEA) is to allow individual decision making units (DMUs) to select the factor weights that are the most advantages for them in calculating their efficiency scores. This flexibility in selecting the weights, on the other hand, deters the comparison among DMUs on a common base. For dealing with this difficulty and assessing all the DMUs on the same scale, this paper proposes to use a multiple objective linear programming (MOLP) approach for generating common set of weights under the DEA framework. This is an advantage of the proposed approach against general approaches in the literature which are based on multiple objective nonlinear programming.