Measuring countries’ performance at the Summer Olympic Games in Rio 2016

TLDR: In this article, the authors constructed a data envelopment analysis model to analyze countries' performance in the 2016 Summer Olympic games in Rio 2016, and the Olympic success is measured regarding medal ranking of each country.

Abstract: Summer Olympic games in Rio 2016 were the biggest and the most important sport event in 2016. Athletes’ performance at Olympics is always of a high interest and serve as a basis for various parametric and non-parametric analyses. In this article, we construct data envelopment analysis model to analyze countries’ performance in Summer Olympic games in Rio 2016. The traditional model structure is based on GDP-population theory. In this article, we go beyond this traditional model structure and introduce economic active population and corruption factors into the model. Similarly, the Olympic success is measured regarding medal ranking of each country. Nevertheless, we enlarge traditional golden, silver and bronze medals output structure, including medal ranking up to 8th position. This model structure enables us to also measure performance of lower performed countries that are traditionally not ranked in the medal rankings. As a complement to the achieved results, we decompose the results regarding World Bank’s income classification to be able to make conclusion of countries’ performance.