Selecting a benevolent secondary goal model in data envelopment analysis cross‐efficiency evaluation by a voting model

A factor that possibly reduces the usefulness of the cross‐efficiency evaluation method is that the cross‐efficiency scores may not be unique due to the presence of alternative optima. As a result, it is recommended that secondary goals be introduced in cross‐efficiency evaluation. In this paper, we first review the existing secondary goals and then extend the idea of some authors to construct three new secondary goals. We also propose a new approach to select the best secondary goal among the mentioned secondary goals by using a voting model. Finally, we apply our approach to a real world problem.