Students' evaluations of teacher performance (SETs) are increasingly used by universities. However, in their current format SET-scores are controversial mainly due to two issues: (1) questionnaire items are relegated to the status of being of equal importance, and (2) the feedback to the...

Although benevolent (BoD) weighting has some appealing features for the construction of evaluation scores of teacher performance (i.e., SET-scores), it still suffers from an important drawback in its basic form: the sensitivity of its outcomes to the influence of potential outliers, extreme...

This paper presents a methodology to aggregate multidimensional research output. Using a tailored version of the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis model, we account for the large heterogeneity in research output and the individual researcher preferences by endogenously weighting the...

Hard data alone are not sufficient to evaluate local police effectiveness in the new age of community policing. Citizens can provide useful feedback regarding strengths and weaknesses of police operations. However, citizen satisfaction indicators typically fail to accurately convey the...

This paper focuses on the construction of a composite indicator for the knowledge based economy using imprecise data. Specifically, for some indicators we only have information on the bounds of the interval within which the true value is believed to lie. The proposed approach is based on a...

Students evaluations of teacher performance (SETs) are increasingly used by universities and colleges for teaching improvement and decision making (e.g., promotion or tenure). However, SETs are highly controversial mainly due to two issues: (1) teachers value various aspects of excellent...

The need to adapt Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and other frontier models in the context of negative data has been a rather neglected issue in the literature. Silva Portela, Thanassoulis, and Simpson (2004) proposed a variation on the directional distance function, a very general distance...

There is a burgeoning literature using non-parametric frontier methods to measure mutual fund performance. These articles measure the relationship between the various characteristics (mainly return information and some costs of ownership) of these specialized financial products to establish a...

We propose a non-parametric methodology to study the presence of economies of scope between teaching and research (i.e., the teaching-research nexus). In particular, the paper advocated a conditional version of the ‘benefit-of-the-doubt’ approach to estimate the relationship between the...

The non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis approach is increasingly used to construct composite indicators for country performance monitoring, benchmarking, and policy evaluation in a large variety of fields. The flexibility in the definition of aggregation weights is praised as the method's...