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.