The use of OWA operator weights for cross‐efficiency aggregation

Cross‐efficiency evaluation is an effective way of ranking decision making units (DMUs) in data envelopment analysis (DEA). Existing approaches for cross‐efficiency evaluation are mainly focused on the calculation of cross‐efficiency matrix, but pay little attention to the aggregation of the efficiencies in the cross‐efficiency matrix. The most widely used approach is to aggregate the efficiencies in each row or column in the cross‐efficiency matrix with equal weights into an average cross‐efficiency score for each DMU and view it as the overall performance measurement of the DMU. This paper focuses on the aggregation process of the efficiencies in the cross‐efficiency matrix and proposes the use of ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator weights for cross‐efficiency aggregation. The use of OWA operator weights for cross‐efficiency aggregation allows the decision maker (DM)’s optimism level towards the best relative efficiencies, characterized by an orness degree, to be taken into consideration in the final overall efficiency assessment and particularly in the selection of the best DMU.