Measuring Olympics achievements based on a parallel DEA approach
Measuring the performance of participating nations in the Olympic Games is an important application of data envelopment analysis (DEA). Prior literature only considers participating nations performance in the Summer Olympic Games. It may be unfair to some nations who are good at the Winter Olympics, but poor at the Summer Olympics. Therefore, we believe it is better to consider the two Olympics together when measuring performance of participants. This paper treats the two Olympics as a parallel system in which each subsystem corresponds to a Summer Olympics or a Winter Olympics, and extends a parallel DEA approach to evaluate the efficiency of each participant. An efficiency decomposition procedure is proposed to obtain the efficiency rang of each Olympic subsystem. Finally, we apply the proposed approach to the latest real data set of the 2012 Summer Olympics and 2010 Winter Olympics.
olympics achievements data envelopment analysis efficiency decomposition parallel structure