A two-phase approach for setting targets in DEA with negative data

Conventional DEA models have been introduced to deal with non-negative data. In the real world, in some occasions, we have outputs and/or inputs, which can take negative data. In DEA literature some approaches have been presented for evaluating performance of units, which operate with negative data. In this paper, firstly, we give a brief review of these works, then we present a new additive based approach in this framework. The proposed model is designed to provide a target with non-negative value associated with negative components for each observed unit, failed by other methods. An empirical application in banking is then used to show the applicability of the proposed method and make a comparison with the other approaches in the literature.