What is Variable Returns

Several researchers in the past have emphasized the importance of computing efficiency measures in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) relative to a best-practice benchmark. Thompson et al. (1995) introduced a nonlinear efficiency measure with linked-cone (LC) assurance-regions (AR) in DEA. In this paper, we compute Thompson-Thrall's measure vis-à-vis linear efficiency measures of CCR (Charnes et al., 1978), BCC (Banker et al., 1984), CCR/AR and BCC/AR (Thompson et al., 1992), relative to “ideal reference”- an industry average. We demonstrate the computations in an application to a set of banks and show that the nonlinear measure is stricter than the linear measures.