Empirical surveys of frontier applications: a meta‐review

Abstract

This contribution is the first attempt to systematically review all empirical surveys that so far have been made available in the broad field of efficiency and productivity analysis using frontier estimation methodologies. We provide a systematic bibliometric review on the many empirical surveys in the field of efficiency and productivity analysis, the most relevant concepts, areas, overlaps, and potentials to explore from its introduction to the most recent surveys. We combine the United Nations’ International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC) taxonomy for the economic activity with the Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) classification system to classify the empirical surveys and to identify the current gaps in the literature. In addition to the most relevant/generic potential areas for applications (according to the United Nation's ISIC), this methodology provides a cluster analysis with the most relevant concepts that have been considered so far (according to the JEL codes). This overview brings an interesting guide for future work to develop the whole field.

A DEA-Based Complexity of Needs Approach for Hospital Beds Evacuation during the COVID-19 Outbreak

“…Charnes et al [ 37 ] and Banker et al [ 38 ] through a mathematical linear dual formulation for multiple outputs/inputs configurations in the efficiency problem introduced the so-called data envelopment analysis (DEA). Today, this is the most common approach to assess the efficiency and productivity of many decision-making units (DMUs) in the number of surveys, applications, methodologies, and computational developments [ 39 , 40 ]. The mathematical programming provides, among other results, the optimal amount of resources to save or products to increase so that an inefficient service unit becomes efficient.…”

What drives citations of frontier application publications?

“…Regarding scope of efficiency and productivity studies, Daraio et al (2020) recently showed that review studies on frontier applications cover 13 out of the 22 areas of economic activity as described by the ISIC scheme. They also showed that, the review studies represented categories A to I of the JEL classification scheme.…”

Multicriteria Ranking for Police Efficient and Effective Analysis

“…Ranking Decision Making Units (DMUs) according to their productive performance has been the objective of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) applications in many sectors of economic activities for classifying both efficient and inefficient units [1,2,3]. Ranking service units provide valuable discriminations that support strategic decision-making by creating incentive structures for rewarding efficient managers, teams, resource allocations, recognizing prospective policies and best practices, changing misleading business competencies, operations and activities, and developing sustainable directions for continuous improvement [4].…”