Analysis of environmental efficiency and marginal rate of substitution in the presence of undesirable factors: A DEA-based approach

The balance between environmental regulations and economic issues has always been one of the main challenges of governments, because with the growth of industrialization, environmental pollution has also increased. Along with the desired outputs in the production process, may also produce undesirable outputs which have a great impact on organizations efficiency and environmental pollution. On the other hand, dealing with the impact of undesirable factors on the inputs and desirable outputs, valuable information for making strategies and organizational decisions could be achieved. Considering undesirable factors, this paper aims to calculate the relative efficiency and marginal ratios of environmental systems using weak and managerial disposability models of data envelopment analysis (DEA). This study is conducted in two phases. In the first one, the regions were classified into efficient and inefficient groups using a developed DEA model. In the second step, the marginal rate of undesirable outputs on the inputs and desirable outputs in efficient areas were calculated. The results showed that the change in the amount of undesirable outputs has a significant effect on other variables.