Ranking and measuring efficiency using secondary goals of cross‐efficiency evaluation ‐ a study of railway efficiency in Iran

This paper makes use of cross‐efficiency measures, as an extension to data envelopment analysis (DEA). The cross‐efficiency evaluation not only provides a ranking among the decision‐making units (DMUs) but also eliminates unrealistic DEA weighting schemes without requiring a priori information on weight restrictions. A problem 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 alternate optima. So, it is recommended that secondary goals be introduced in cross‐efficiency evaluation. In some cases, pursuing the best ranking is more important than maximising the individual score. This paper develops a new secondary goal based on symmetric weights selection. For illustration of models, the railway activities from 1977 to 2010 are considered and the efficiency of each year is calculated and compared to the other years.