Directional Congestion in Data Envelopment Analysis

Abstract

First, this paper proposes the definition of directional congestion in certain input and output directions in the framework of data envelopment analysis (DEA). Second, two methods from different viewpoints are also proposed to estimate the directional congestion in a DEA framework. Third, we address the relations among directional congestion and classic congestion and strong (weak) congestion. Finally, we present a case study investigating the analysis of the research institutes in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) to demonstrate the applicability and usefulness of the methods developed in this paper.