Article ID: | iaor20071878 |
Country: | Germany |
Volume: | 145 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 339 |
End Page Number: | 365 |
Publication Date: | Jul 2006 |
Journal: | Annals of Operations Research |
Authors: | Dul Jos H., Bougnol Marie-Laure |
Keywords: | statistics: data envelopment analysis, programming: linear, performance |
There is a general interest in ranking schemes applied to complex entities described by multiple attributes. Published rankings for universities are in great demand but are also highly controversial. We compare two classification and ranking schemes involving universities; one from a published report, ‘Top American Research Universities’ by the University of Florida's TheCenter and the other using DEA. Both approaches use the same data and model. We compare the two methods and discover important equivalences. We conclude that the critical aspect in classification and ranking is the model. This suggests that DEA is a suitable tool for these types of studies.