Regret-based cross efficiency evaluation method in a general two-stage DEA system

Cross efficiency (CE) evaluation in data envelopment analysis (DEA) has significant advantages in ranking decision making units (DMUs). A variety of CE evaluation methods with different secondary goals are proposed in traditional black-box DEA models. At present, some scholars have studied the CE evaluation approaches in two-stage DEA systems. However, these studies commonly think of decision makers (DMs) as perfectly rational and ignore the influence of DMs’ psychological factors on the evaluation results. To conquer these limitations, this study introduces regret theory to portray DMs’ psychological preferences and investigates two-stage CE evaluation models based on regret theory. We bring in the comprehensive perceived utility of DMUs by combining direct utility and indirect utility at first, and then develop the regret-based two-stage cross efficiency (RTCE) models in a centralized and a decentralized decision environments respectively. The efficiency of Chinese “double first-class” universities are evaluated to verify our models and a completely ranking of them can be obtained. Finally, a comparative analysis is conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed models.