An Application of Frontier Analysis: Handicapping Running Races

Economists have used frontier analysis for some time now to measure the efficiency of the firm. Recently, particularly since the development of data envelopment analysis, management scientists have applied efficient frontier analysis to a variety of problems. We used linear programming to estimate a frontier function that describes where the age records for a particular running race should be, given the current records. The frontier function is used to handicap running races based on age and sex. The frontier method is an improvement over current methods in that it avoids the problem of soft records for some ages.