  Incorporating an assurance region (AR) into the slacks-based measure (SBM)
improves practicality; however, its efficiency measure may not have desirable
properties, such as monotonicity. We incorporate a closer target setting
approach into the SBM with AR and a variant of the SBM with AR. We demonstrate
that the efficiency measure with the hybrid approach has the same desirable
properties as that without AR, and we also show that the efficiency scores can
be computed by solving linear programming problems. Our proposed approach can
handle zeros in the observed input-output data without any data transformation
or additional model modification.
