Characterizing an equitable allocation of fixed costs and resources via data envelopment analysis

In many allocations to which data envelopment analysis (DEA) could be applied, there are often fixed costs or resources that are imposed on all decision making units (DMUs). How can these costs or resources be assigned in a reasonable way to various DMUs? To obtain an appropriate allocation, in this paper we propose a DEA approach, which is based on two assumptions: efficiency invariance, minimal deviation. For illustrating the method, numerical results for examples from the literature are presented.