Models for measuring and benchmarking olympics achievements

As demonstrated in several recent studies, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a useful tool for evaluating and comparing the performance of nations competing in the Olympic Games. Assurance regions (ARs) have been used to further refine the DEA results. These AR DEA models assume that ARs apply uniformly across all nations. Such models can have shortcomings in the sense that different nations may impose different ARs, as nations may value gold, silver, and bronze medals differently. This paper extends previous DEA studies by incorporating multiple sets of nation-specific ARs into the DEA. By doing so, we establish fair models for measuring and benchmarking the performance of nations at six summer Olympic Games. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.