Comparing Data Envelopment Analysis and Human Decision Making Unit Rankings: A Survey Approach

In this paper we compare the ordinal rankings generated through Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methods to ordinal rankings generated by human decision makers. Through eliciting the total rank ordering for approximately 100 individuals on all of the four different datasets of Decision Making Units (DMUs), we compare the rankings generated by individuals to those generated by ten DEA methods. We observe that depending on the characteristics of the dataset one of the DEA methods performs better than the others in matching human decision makers.