Efficiency Frontier Ideal Distance Evaluation in Presence of Integer-Values in DEA by Directional Distance Function Approach

In conventional DEA methods, all inputs and outputs are assumed to be continuous. However, the implied presumption of continuous data may not maintain an acceptable level of precision in practical data. Many practical situations such as number of teachers in a school, number of students in a college, or research papers only take integer values. Presented work presumes subsets of input and output variables in traditional five-pronged axioms in DEA model to be integer values for the first time in the field. An additional effort in this work expands axioms and a new model is presented. This paper presents a novel two phase model that in the first phase produces more precise efficiency values and the best benchmark in its second phase, i.e. the nearest integer point to the efficiency boundary is selected based on constant returns to scale. A case study is presented that demonstrates a comparison of efficiency values obtained with this model compared to prior models that is show in table ۱. And in Table ۲, the values of the slack are compared with each other.