a cost malmquist productivity index capturing group performance this paper develops an index for comparing the productivity of groups of operating units in cost terms when input prices are available in that sense it represents an extension of a similar index available in the literature for comparing groups of units in terms of technical productivity in the absence of input prices the index is decomposed to reveal the origins of differences in performance of the groups of units both in terms of technical and cost productivity the index and its decomposition are of value in contexts where the need arises to compare units which perform the same function but they can be grouped by virtue of the fact that they operate in different contexts as might for example arise in comparisons of water or gas transmission companies operating in different countries

multinational operation ownership and efficiency differences in the international oil industry abstract although state involvement in market systems often leads to inefficiency this influence in the oil industry is not dwindling due to strong growth of some state oil companies based on this background there are concerns about how state firms can continue to stay relevant in the international oil industry by offsetting inefficiencies due to state control this study assesses the effects of multinational operations on the performance of oil firms this is achieved by comparing productive and scale efficiencies of state and private oil companies as well as state multinationals and private multinationals a dataset of 50 firms each year from 2001 to 2010 reveals that although multinational operation is important in reducing productive inefficiencies of state firms it does not mitigate scale inefficiencies of state owned firms state firms should therefore make multinational operations a key policy direction since this will provide a transformative agenda towards equally competing with their private counterparts however better efforts need to be paid in reducing scale inefficiencies that are pervasive among state owned oil firms providing better controls on firm size will provide better drive towards future efficient production levels

operationalizing opportunities in entrepreneurship research use of data envelopment analysis despite the impressive development of substantive theories in entrepreneurship without the development of measurement theories further advancement of the field is problematic in particular the notion of opportunities central to entrepreneurship research requires adequate macro level operationalization we demonstrate how to employ data envelopment analysis dea to operationalize not only innovative opportunities but also technological arbitrage opportunities we provide an illustrative example based on a sample of 66 countries during the period of 1993 2002 we include estimates of innovative and arbitrage opportunities for possible use by other scholars discuss the promise and limitations of such estimates demonstrate how both innovative and arbitrage opportunities correlate with the rates of entrepreneurial activity and suggest several possible directions for future research

deregulation consolidation and efficiency evidence from the spanish insurance industry this paper provides new information on the effects of deregulation and consolidation in financial services markets by analyzing the spanish insurance industry the sample period 1989 98 spans the introduction of the european union s eu third generation insurance directives which deregulated the eu insurance market deregulation has led to dramatic changes in the spanish insurance market the number of firms declined by 35 average firm size increased by 275 and unit prices declined significantly in both life and non life insurance we analyze the causes and effects of consolidation using modern frontier efficiency analysis to estimate cost technical and allocative efficiency as well as using malmquist analysis to measure total factor productivity tfp change the results show that many small inefficient and financially underperforming firms were eliminated from the market due to insolvency or liquidation as a result the market experienced significant growth in tfp over the sample period consolidation not only reduced the number of firms operating with increasing returns to scale but also increased the number operating with decreasing returns to scale hence many large firms should focus on improving efficiency by adopting best practices rather than on further growth

a comprehensive eco efficiency model and dynamics of regional eco efficiency in china abstract in order to have a comprehensive eco efficiency measure which can incorporate productivity resource efficiency environmental efficiency and inter temporal comparability and circularity the paper proposes an extended data envelopment analysis model named gb us sbm model which combines global benchmark technology undesirable output super efficiency and slacks based measure using the gb us sbm model this paper investigates the dynamics of regional eco efficiency in china from 2000 to 2010 the empirical results show that the movement of average eco efficiency of china presents a v shape from 2000 to 2010 with the trough occurred in 2005 but there are big differences of eco efficiency among the regions for the growth of eco efficiency technological progress contributes 56 87 58 21 18 27 62 19 scale efficiency contributes 40 01 61 14 167 43 39 12 efficiency change contributes 3 82 19 99 63 40 2 16 to the eastern middle western and northeastern regions of china respectively these imply that there is a big space for western region to enhance its technological progress and huge space for the whole country to promote its management ability

note on economic production quantity model for items with imperfect quality a practical approach abstract in this note we present a simple approach for determining the economic production quantity for an item with imperfect quality we compare the results based on the simple approach with the optimal method for determining the lot size and show that almost optimal results are obtained using the simple approach

public and private inputs in aggregate production and growth a cross country efficiency approach in a cross section of oecd countries we replace the macroeconomic production function by a production possibility frontier total factor productivity being the composite effect of efficiency scores and possibility frontier changes we consider for the periods 1970 1980 1990 and 2000 one output gdp per worker and three inputs human capital public physical capital per worker and private physical capital per worker we use a semi parametric analysis computing malmquist productivity indexes and we also resort to stochastic frontier analysis results show that private capital is important for growth although public and human capital also contribute positively a governance indicator a nondiscretionary input explains inefficiency better governance helps countries to achieve a better performance nonparametric and parametric results coincide rather closely on the movements of the countries vis a vis the possibility frontier and on their relative distances to the frontier

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

has china s fast industrial growth been efficient an industry level investigation with a newly constructed data set we adopt contemporaneous nonradial and variable returns to scale assumptions in a data envelopment analysis dea exercise to address the inefficiency problem in chinese industries in different policy regimes using a newly constructed data set for 24 chinese manufacturing industries in 1952 2008 while confirming that the central planning period was indeed a graveyard for productivity that entailed severe technical regress and efficiency losses we do not find a steady improvement in efficiency during the reform period despite strong technical progress we argue that the resurgent prominence of the government and the state sector since the late 1990s especially following china s world trade organization accession has obstructed the efficiency improvement

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency in their comment subhash c ray and evangelia desli 1997 hereafter rd point out that the specification of the decomposition of the malmquist productivity index used by fare et al 1994 hereafter fgnz is not unique and propose and compute an alternative specification of that decomposition we will discuss additional decompositions at the end of this note but proceed here by comparing the rd decomposition with fgnz based on both conceptual and computational grounds rd provide a discussion of the overall malmquist productivity index including the important issue of when this index is equivalent to the traditional notion of total factor productivity tfp namely under the condition that the reference technology be consistent with constant returns to scale crs as they point out this will yield a measure of tfp even if the true underlying technology is not crs for example both rd and fgnz use the crs reference technology to compute overall malmquist productivity one of the key issues raised is the role of the underlying scale properties of the benchmark technologies used to define and compute both productivity and its components in particular two reference technologies are employed in both rd and fgnz what we refer to as crs and variable returns to scale vrs technologies by construction these technologies are nested the crs technology contains the vrs technology as in figure 1 in rd this nestedness provides the logical basis for our decomposition at a very intuitive level we would argue that these two benchmarks can be used to provide bounds on the underlying true but unknown technology 2 intuitively we see the vrs technology providing a type of convex inner approximation whereas the crs technology provides a type of convex outer approximation thus these two technologies provide alternative benchmarks they do not require that the data satisfy either crs or vrs another possible intuitive interpretation is that the crs captures a perhaps hypothetical long run and the vrs approximates the short run as a reference technology the crs technology has some very useful features for example it captures the notion of maximal

productivity and efficiency of us gas transmission companies a european regulatory perspective on both sides of the atlantic the regulation of gas transmission networks has undergone major changes since the early 1990s whereas in the us the long standing regime of cost plus regulation was complemented by increasing pipe to pipe competition most european countries moved towards incentive regulation complemented by market integration we study the productivity development of a panel of us interstate companies using data envelopment analysis and malmquist productivity indices results are presented for changes in productivity as well as for several convergence tests the results indicate that taking productivity and convergence as performance indicators regulation has been rather successful in particular during a period where overall demand was flat however we argue that a benchmarking based regulation might have brought about stronger convergence lessons for european regulators are twofold first the us analysis shows that benchmarking of european transmission operators would be possible if data were available second our results suggest that in the long run market integration and competition are alternatives to the current european model

sources of productivity growth in the spanish pharmaceutical industry 1994 2000 abstract the spanish pharmaceutical industry underwent an important transformation during the 1990s to survive under the new market conditions labs had to refocus their competitive strategies towards increasing productive efficiency or reinforcing research and development r d activities this paper analyzes the evolution of the productive patterns in a sample of 80 pharmaceutical laboratories that operated in spain from 1994 to 2000 we estimate malmquist productivity indexes and decompose them into four sources of productivity change the results suggest that pure technical efficiency change and the scale change of the technology explain most of the productivity growth observed during the period the contribution of technical change to productivity growth is negligible indicating a poor result from r d activities at least in the groups of small and medium sized labs

regulations and productivity growth in banking evidence from transition economies this paper examines the relationship between the regulatory and supervision framework and the productivity of banks in 22 countries over the period 1999 2009 we follow a semiparametric two step approach that combines malmquist index estimates with bootstrap regressions the results indicate that regulations and incentives that promote private monitoring pmon have a positive impact on productivity restrictions on banks activities relating to their involvement in securities insurance real estate and ownership of nonfinancial firms also have a positive impact regulations relating to the first and second pillars of basel ii namely capital requirements capr and official supervisory power spr do not have in general a statistically significant impact on productivity over the study period although they appear to gain in importance following the onset of the financial crisis in 2007 the latter finding indicates that stringent capital and supervisory standards have positive productivity effects when financial pressures peak our results are robust when controlling for various country specific features and alternative estimation approaches

generating efficiency economic and environmental regulation of public and private electricity generators in spain abstract economic regulation of firms with market power has placed increasing emphasis on incentive based regulation such as price caps we focus on the effect of regulation as distinct from ownership and identify the effect of two different regulatory schemes on both publicly and privately owned spanish electricity generators publicly owned generators were more efficient under cost of service regulation private but not public firms responded to incentive regulation by increasing efficiency bringing their productivity to similar levels we introduce some novelty in modelling efficiency including three pollutants and declared plant availability as outputs and we test for the effect of environmental regulation in reducing pollutants

how technological innovations affect urban eco efficiency in china a prefecture level panel data analysis abstract this paper utilizes sbm undesirable model and malmquist index to examine the urban eco efficiency in china and analyzes the regional heterogeneity through the panel data of 273 prefecture level cities during 2007 2017 in china the spatial durbin model is used to examine the influencing factors of urban eco efficiency associated with technological innovations the results show that the average values of urban eco efficiency of the east central and west regions are 0 93 0 88 and 0 90 respectively the moran s i of eco efficiency is around 0 8 which shows a strong spatial heterogeneity it is found that higher innovative ability can increase urban eco efficiency education investment and innovation talents have a u shape relationship with urban eco efficiency while capital investment and innovation performance have an inverted u shape relationship with it this research outlines the relationship between technological innovations and urban eco efficiency offering policy implications for china s eco construction and sustainable urban development

malmquist productivity index decompositions a unifying framework in two widely cited but unpublished working papers simar and wilson 1998 and zofio and lovell 1998 proposed an alternative decomposition of the malmquist productivity index which retained what seemed to be the strongholds of previous proposals with regard to the contribution of technological and efficiency change to productivity change namely a technical change term with regard to the best practice variable returns to scale vrs technology which is to be found in ray and desli 1997 and a scale efficiency change term that illustrates a firm s situation with regard to optimal scale benchmark technology fare et al 1994 attaining this objective required the introduction of an additional term in the malmquist productivity index decomposition which would reflect the scale bias of technical change it is our objective to provide economic rationale for this term within a theory of production context the existing decompositions and recent articles that further elaborate on this issue the ide

a nonparametric method to estimate a technical change effect on marginal abatement costs of u s coal power plants the literature usually assumes that technical change reduces marginal abatement cost however recent results suggest that precisely the opposite occurs this paper proposes a nonparametric method to determine the effect of technical change on marginal abatement cost the method decomposes nox marginal abatement cost changes in 2000 2004 and in 2004 2008 for 325 boilers operating in 134 u s bituminous coal power plant into technical and non technical change effects we find that technical change reduces the nox marginal cost about 28 3 in 2000 2004 and 26 5 in 2004 2008 however more stringent regulations enacted the nox budget program results in lower nox emission levels as plant operators install more advanced nox abatement equipment which in turn causes an overall increase in marginal abatement cost

nonparametric estimation of education productivity incorporating nondiscretionary inputs with an application to dutch schools in this paper we develop a malmquist productivity index for public sector production characterized by the influence of environmental variables we extend johnson and ruggiero 2011 to the more general case of variable returns to scale to further decompose the malmquist productivity index into technical efficiency scale and environmental change we apply our model to analyze productivity of dutch schools using 2002 2007 data the results indicate that the environment influences the productivity index as well as the technical efficiency scale and environmental change components we see that schools with a moderate classification of environment have the highest productivity numbers in line with expectations schools with the worst environment also perform worse and would perform better with an improved environment

single market effects on productivity in the german insurance industry abstract the single market project of the european commission was supposed to foster productivity growth in the financial service industry we assess its consequences on productivity development in the german insurance industry one of the largest insurance markets within the european union by applying data envelopment analysis to a panel of german insurance companies we estimate standard and bootstrapped efficiency scores for the years 1991 through 2006 and apply a test on scale efficiency based on bootstrapped statistics furthermore we compute a malmquist index and test for different types of productivity convergence across firms

the existence of equilibrium in discontinuous economic games ii applications in part i of this study we established two existence theorems for mixed strategy equilibrium in games with discontinuous payoff functions see theorems 4 4 and 5 5 in dasgupta and maskin 1986 hereafter d m 1986 in this second part we use the second of these two theorems to prove the existence of mixed strategy equilibrium in some wellknown discontinuous economic games that fail to have pure strategy equilibria the models we analyse are the bertrand edgeworth example of price setting duopolists with capacity constraints see section 2 2 price competition among firms producing differentiated products hotelling 1929 and d aspremont gabszewicz and thisse 1979 see section 2 3 spatial competition eaton and lipsey 1975 and shaked 1975 see section 3 and models of market dependent information rothschild and stiglitz 1976 and wilson 1977 section 4 the paper concludes section 5 with a classification of these models

productivity growth in large us commercial banks the initial post deregulation experience abstract we explore productivity growth for a group of 201 large us commercial banks over the initial post deregulation period from 1984 to 1990 using data envelopment analysis dea we measure productivity growth using malmquist productivity indexes and isolate the contributions of technical change technical efficiency change and scale change to productivity growth we find overall productivity growth at the rate of about 4 5 per year on average but productivity declined by 7 61 between 1984 and 1985 and by 0 33 between 1988 and 1989 our second stage panel regressions reveal that larger asset size and specialization of product mix associate with higher productivity growth while higher equity to assets associates with lower productivity growth

trademarking activities and total factor productivity some evidence for british commercial banks using a metafrontier approach in this paper we compute a non parametric metafrontier malmquist index to evaluate the total factor productivity tfp change among uk based trademarking and non trademarking commercial banks between 2005 and 2013 the use of the metafrontier approach allows us to a identify the drivers of tfp growth for each group of banks b compare the tfp growth of each group to the tfp growth experienced by the whole industry and c assess the extent to which the former catches up with the latter measured along the metafrontier our results suggest that tfp has been increasing among trademarking banks up to the onset of the financial crisis but this process has since reversed the catch up indexes suggest that both groups of banks were catching up with the metafrontier up to the financial crisis although the drivers of this process differed between the two groups after the financial crisis improvements in technology have been driven by a small number of commercial banks i e the non trademarking banks these results suggest that a large section of the commercial banking sector has not been able to overcome the effects of the financial crisis

productivity and efficiency change and shareholder value evidence from the spanish banking sector productivity change and shareholder value have been analysed in the banking sector in the last few years although it should be noted that these two important aspects have been studied separately in this regard the main contribution of our study is to link these two lines of research by verifying whether those banks characterized by higher levels of efficiency and productivity change have a higher shareholder value to measure changes in efficiency and productivity we use the malmquist nonparametric technique which is calculated from data envelopment analysis dea linear programming approach the malmquist total factor productivity index enables separation of the catching up effect i e changes over time in technical efficiency from technological change i e the shift of best practice frontier over time due to technological progress our results for a sample of listed spanish banks in the period 2000 to 2004 confirm that those banks with higher efficiency and productivity changes have a higher

the impact of military technology transfer on economic growth international evidence the purpose of this article is to measure the impact of military technology transfer on economic growth for 67 selected countries during the period 2000 to 2005 through the application of the malmquist productivity index which is broken down into efficiency change and technical change our main findings are as follows first technology diffusion is all pervading in half of the sampled countries due to pure efficiency and scale efficiency changes second a higher income level and an excess of arms imports lead to innovative activities third middle income countries have higher efficiency and pure efficiency changes these contribute to higher total productivity change finally after separating the impact of capital investment from that of arms imports the diffusion of military technology has a more positive and substantial impact on economic growth thereby revealing the presence of externalities between countries

plant level productivity efficiency and environmental performance of the container glass industry this paper presents a methodology and empirical results based on themalmquist productivity index we measure productivity while treatingpollution as an undesirable output our estimates show that technicalchange has contributed to productivity and environmental performancegrowth in the container glass industry an energy and pollution intensivesector changes in inter plant efficiency over time have made thisproductivity growth more rapid than otherwise would have occurred withthe underlying technical change the efficiency estimates show that thereare both opportunities to improve productivity and reduce pollution in thisindustry as well as productivity losses associated with the emissionscontrol the shadow prices for nox the undesirable output we analyze is quite high compared to other regulated sectors

comparing school ownership performance using a pseudo panel database a malmquist type index approach in this paper we propose a different way of using the malmquist index that allows us to further analyze the relative performance divergences between two groups of decision making units dmus over time when only a pseudo panel database is available to do this we extend the camanho and dyson 2006 one period malmquist type index cdmi for a pseudo panel database with a new pseudo panel malmquist index ppmi to illustrate the methodology we apply it to examine how the performance gap between public and private government dependent secondary schools in the basque country spain performed across three pisa waves 2006 2009 and 2012 the results suggest that performance is persistently and significantly higher for private government dependent schools than for public schools

market equilibrium with hidden knowledge and self selection the problem of the existence of a competitive equilibrium in models with hidden knowledge and self knowledge has been discussed previously by m rothschild and j e stiglitz 1976 c a wilson 1977 and j g riley 1979 recent analyses of such models by i cho and d kreps 1986 and riley argue for a particular outcome the pareto dominant separating zero profit one the authors prove the existence of such an outcome under very general conditions and generalizing the reactive equilibrium concept introduced by riley they prove this outcome is the unique reactive equilibrium copyright 1987 by the econometric society

estimating most productive scale size using data envelopment analysis abstract the relation between the most productive scale size mpss for paparticular input and output mixes and returns to scale for multiple inputs multiple outputs situations is explicitly developed this relation is then employed to extend the applications of data envelopment analysis dea introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes ccr to the estimation of most productive scale sizes for convex production possibility sets it is then shown that in addition to productive inefficiencies at the actual scale size the ccr efficiency measure also reflects any inefficiencies due to divergence from the most productive scale size two illustrations of the practical applications of these results to the estimation of most productive scale sizes and returns to scale for hospitals and stem electric generation plants are also provided emphasize the advantage of this method in examining specific segments of the efficient production surface

did china s regional transport industry enjoy better carbon productivity under regulations despite rapid economic development the transport industry has been claimed to account for a major part of climate change this paper investigates total factor carbon sensitive productivity growth in the regional transport sector in china and decomposes its dynamic changes over time taking account of the regional heterogeneity of different provinces thus the contemporaneous metafrontier malmquist luenberger approach that combined with non radial directional distance functions is proposed and define a new indicator called the contemporaneous metafrontier malmquist luenberger carbon emission performance index cmml this total factor indicator includes the metafrontier efficiency change index mec the metafrontier technology change index mtc and the metafrontier technology gap change index tgc results show an about 4 increase in overall total factor carbon emission productivity during the period of 2000 2012 different growth patterns are also observed in the transport sector across different area of china in the eastern region the growth of carbon productivity is driven mainly by pure efficiency changes whereas the central region is driven mainly by innovations in the low carbon transport technology

a game theoretic foundation of competitive equilibria with adverse selection equilibria with adverse selection we construct a fully specified extensive form game that captures competitive markets with adverse selection in particular it allows firms to offer any finite set of contracts so that cross subsidization is not ruled out moreover firms can withdraw from the market after initial contract offers have been observed we show that a subgame perfect equilibrium always exists and that in fact when withdrawal is costless the set of subgame perfect equilibrium outcomes may correspond to the entire set of feasible contracts we then focus on robust equilibria that exist both when withdrawal costs are zero and when they are arbitrarily small but strictly positive we show that the miyazaki wilson contracts are the unique robust equilibrium outcome of our game this outcome is always constrained efficient and involves cross subsidization from low to high risk agents that is increasing in the share of low risks in the population under weak conditions on risk preferences

haulage sharing approach to achieve sustainability in material purchasing new method and numerical applications abstract transportation costs are becoming increasingly important in inventory replenishment decisions and in practice lot sizing decisions are strongly affected by material handling equipment transportation flow paths vehicle capacities and technical constraints companies within a global sourcing context daily experience the cost of transportation as playing a major role in total purchasing costs on the other hand sustainability issues are always more urgent and environmental impact assessment is becoming a key requirement for materials purchasing and transportation choices this work is particularly focusing on an interesting new area of research the haulage sharing in freight transportation when sustainability considerations are taken into account the paper develops and discusses a new haulage sharing lot sizing model in which two partners are cooperating in sharing transportation paths and handling units a three step methodology based on multi objective optimization approach is here proposed to permit the complete evaluation of the costs and savings that arise with an horizontal cooperation the method is described here and applied to two different numerical cases in order to drive useful conclusions and discuss future research steps

pollution abatement activities and traditional productivity abstract this study models the joint production of good and bad output production and calculates traditional productivity when bad output production is regulated and when it is unregulated we apply this model to data for u s coal fired electric power plants for 1985 1995 and compare rates of productivity and technical change to gain an understanding of the association between pollution abatement activities and traditional rates of productivity and technical change while traditional productivity and technical change associated with abatement activities decline we conclude they are not statistically significant

neutrally optimal mechanism under adverse selection the canonical insurance problem abstract this paper revisits the problem of adverse selection in the insurance market of rothschild and stiglitz 1976 we extend the three stage game in hellwig 1987 by allowing firms to endogenously choose whether or not to pre commit on their contractual offers menus we show how this mechanism can deliver the miyazaki wilson spence allocation as the unique perfect bayesian equilibrium this allocation is the unique incentive efficient and individually rational maximizer of the utility of the most profitable type in fact given that the informed player has only two types it is the unique core allocation and thus the unique neutral optimum in the sense of myerson 1983

efficiency productivity gains and the size of brazilian supermarkets abstract the supermarket sector is an important segment of the brazilian economy in recent years the role of large retailers and market globalization has transformed this sector in one of the most competitive in the country this paper aims to evaluate the technical efficiency and scale of the brazilian supermarket sector through bootstrap data envelopment analysis and to measure changes in productivity from 2005 to 2012 applying the bootstrapped malmquist index a second stage analysis is performed to explain efficiency levels and productivity gains in terms of supermarket chains characteristics we found that the brazilian supermarket chains have low average efficiency levels and in general there was an increase in productivity in the period the consolidations that took place in this sector can be explained in terms of scales of operation small supermarket chains had lower efficiency levels both in 2005 and 2012 but experienced higher levels of productivity growth in the period results of second stage analysis shows that some supermarket chains characteristics are correlated to productivity gains

productivity measurement in radial dea models with a single constant input abstract we consider productivity measurement based on radial dea models with a single constant input we show that in this case the malmquist and the hicks moorsteen productivity indices coincide and are multiplicatively complete the choice of orientation of the malmquist index for the measurement of productivity change does not matter and there is a unique decomposition of productivity change containing two independent sources namely technical efficiency change and technical change technical change decomposes in an infinite number of ways into a radial magnitude effect and an output bias effect we also show that the aggregate productivity index is given by the geometric mean between any two periods of the simple arithmetic averages of the individual contemporaneous and mixed period distance functions

a cost malmquist productivity index this paper develops a productivity index applicable when producers are cost minimisers and input prices are known the index is inspired by the malmquist index as extended to productivity measurement the index developed here is defined in terms of input cost rather than input quantity distance functions hence productivity change is decomposed into overall efficiency and cost technical change furthermore overall efficiency change is decomposed into technical and allocative efficiency change and cost technical change into a part capturing shifts of input quantities and shifts of relative input prices these decompositions provide a clearer picture of the root sources of productivity change they are illustrated here in a sample of hospitals results are computed using non parametric mathematical programming 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

a multi objective stochastic programming approach for supply chain design considering risk abstract in this paper we develop a multi objective stochastic programming approach for supply chain design under uncertainty demands supplies processing transportation shortage and capacity expansion costs are all considered as the uncertain parameters to develop a robust model two additional objective functions are added into the traditional comprehensive supply chain design problem so our multi objective model includes i the minimization of the sum of current investment costs and the expected future processing transportation shortage and capacity expansion costs ii the minimization of the variance of the total cost and iii the minimization of the financial risk or the probability of not meeting a certain budget the ideas of unreliable suppliers and capacity expansion after the realization of uncertain parameters are also incorporated into the model finally we use the goal attainment technique to obtain the pareto optimal solutions that can be used for decision making

a multi objective robust optimization model for multi product multi site aggregate production planning in a supply chain under uncertainty abstract manufacturers need to satisfy consumer demands in order to compete in the real world this requires the efficient operation of a supply chain planning in this research we consider a supply chain including multiple suppliers multiple manufacturers and multiple customers addressing a multi site multi period multi product aggregate production planning app problem under uncertainty first a new robust multi objective mixed integer nonlinear programming model is proposed to deal with app considering two conflicting objectives simultaneously as well as the uncertain nature of the supply chain cost parameters of the supply chain and demand fluctuations are subject to uncertainty then the problem transformed into a multi objective linear one the first objective function aims to minimize total losses of supply chain including production cost hiring firing and training cost raw material and end product inventory holding cost transportation and shortage cost the second objective function considers customer satisfaction through minimizing sum of the maximum amount of shortages among the customers zones in all periods working levels workers productivity overtime subcontracting storage capacity and lead time are also considered finally the proposed model is solved as a single objective mixed integer programming model applying the lp metrics method the practicability of the proposed model is demonstrated through its application in solving an app problem in an industrial case study the results indicate that the proposed model can provide a promising approach to fulfill an efficient production planning in a supply chain

supply chain optimization of petroleum organization under uncertainty in market demands and prices a multi period stochastic planning model has been developed and implemented for a supply chain network of a petroleum organization operating in an oil producing country under uncertain market conditions the proposed supply chain network consists of all activities related to crude oil production processing and distribution uncertainties were introduced in market demands and prices a deterministic optimization model was first developed and tested the impact of uncertainty on the supply chain was studied by performing a sensitivity analysis in which 20 deviations were introduced in market demands and prices of different commodities a stochastic formulation was then proposed which is based on the two stage problem with finite number of realizations the proposed stochastic programming approach proved to be quite effective in developing resilient production plans in light of high degree of uncertainty in market conditions the anticipated production plans have a considerably lower expected value of perfect information evpi the main conclusion of this study is that for an oil producing country with oil processing capabilities the impact of economic uncertainties may be tolerated by an appropriate balance between crude exports and processing capacities

dynamic environmental performance analysis a malmquist index approach abstract this article presents a general framework for dynamic environmental performance analysis by generalizing the approach proposed by kuosmanen and kortelainen kuosmanen t kortelainen m 2005 measuring eco efficiency of production with data envelopment analysis journal of industrial ecology 9 4 59 72 from a static to a dynamic setting for this purpose we construct an environmental performance index epi by applying frontier efficiency techniques and a malmquist index approach compared to other dynamic environmental productivity and efficiency analysis approaches based on these methods our approach builds on the standard definition of eco efficiency as it is presented in the ecological economics literature recognizing the importance to analyze the sources of environmental performance changes we show how changes in overall environmental performance can be decomposed into changes in relative eco efficiency and shifts in environmental technology respectively we apply the presented technique at the macro level to dynamic environmental performance analysis of 20 member states of the european union in 1990 2003 according to the results environmental technical change mostly explains the improvement in overall environmental performance while relative eco efficiency change has been minor for most countries during the sample period

a century of evolution from harris s basic lot size model survey and research agenda abstract determining the economic lot size has always represented one of the most important issues in production planning this problem has long attracted the attention of researchers and several models have been developed to meet requirements at minimum cost in this paper we explore and discuss the evolution of these models during one hundred years of history starting from the basic model developed by harris in 1913 up to today following harris s work a number of researchers have devised extensions that incorporate additional considerations the evolution of eoq theory strongly reflects the development of industrial systems over the past century here we outline all the research areas faced in the past by conducting a holistic analysis of 219 selected journal papers and trying to give a comprehensive view of past work on the eoq problem finally a new research agenda is proposed and discussed

mixed strategy equilibrium in a market with asymmetric information in the mid 1970s several authors studied models of markets with asymmetric information in which equilibria do not exist although those authors focused on models of insurance and education it was recognized that similar nonexistence problems arise in a wide class of models with asymmetric information recently dasgupta and maskin have demonstrated that for a game theoretic version of at least one of those models although no equilibria may exist in pure strategies equilibria exist in mixed strategies in the present paper we construct a mixed strategy equilibrium for one member of the class spence s signalling model of education qualitative features of the equilibrium are explored

an eoq model under retailer partial trade credit policy in supply chain abstract the main purpose of this paper is to investigate the retailer s inventory policy under two levels of trade credit to reflect the supply chain management situation in this paper we assume that the retailer has the powerful decision making right so we extend the assumption that the retailer can obtain the full trade credit offered by the supplier and the retailer just offers the partial trade credit to his her customer then we investigate the retailer s inventory system as a cost minimization problem to determine the retailer s optimal inventory policy under the supply chain management two easy to use theorems are developed to efficiently determine the optimal inventory policy for the retailer we deduce some previously published results of other researchers as special cases finally numerical examples are given to illustrate the theorems and obtain a lot of managerial phenomena

on two definitions of productivity abstract caves et al in 1982 introduced a productivity measure that does not proceed from a continuous timer presentation they named these indexes after sten malmquist who in 1953 used ratios of distance functions to formulate quantity indexes in the consumer context in a later paper diewert proposed an alternative definition of productivity also based on distance functions which he attributed to hicks and moorsteen in this letter we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the malmquist productivity index to equal the hicks moorsteen index

decomposing productivity indexes into explanatory factors abstract productivity measures are increasingly regarded as key indicators of economic performance identifying sources of productivity growth is of interest to both firms and policy makers this paper revisits the debate on how to decompose productivity growth into explanatory factors with a focus on extracting technical progress technical efficiency change and returns to scale components using bjurek s concept of the malmquist index introduced into production theory in a systematic way by caves christensen and diewert a reference technology is required to define the components of interest unlike other approaches ours do not make any convexity assumptions on the reference technology but instead follows the example of tulkens and his coauthors in assuming that the reference technology satisfies free disposability assumptions a new decomposition of a productivity index is provided with the existence and properties of the underlying distance functions of the decomposition proven under relatively unrestrictive assumptions the paper also provides for the first time a theoretical justification for the geometric average form of the bjurek productivity index these rigorous theoretical contributions provide significant avenues for enhanced understanding of empirical productivity performance

the existence of equilibrium in discontinuous economic games i theory the article presents information about the existence of equilibrium in discontinuous economic games in this paper and its sequel presents study the existence of nash equilibrium in games where agents payoff functions are discontinuous the enquiry is motivated by a number of recent studies that have uncovered serious existence problems in seemingly innocuous economic games in the sequel to this paper authors have explained the utility function in the economic games referred to earlier are neither continuous nor quasi concave however they demonstrate that the payoff functions in mildly modified versions of these constructs exhibit two weaker forms of continuity which together with the requirement of quasi concavity suffice for the existence of an equilibrium from this one may conclude that at least in the modified versions of these models discontinuities in the payoff functions are not the real source of the problem rather it is the failure of the payoff functions to the quasi concave which is responsible for the non existence of equilibrium these observations bear on the existence of nash equilibrium in pure strategies

measuring and decomposing productivity change measuring productivity change with malmquist indices has become common practice because they are easily computed using nonparametric programming techniques and can be readily decomposed into technical and efficiency change however this approach is nonstochastic and requires a constant returns to scale assumption to construct the reference technology we propose estimating productivity change using a stochastic input distance frontier imposing no restrictions on returns to scale we derive the analogous decomposition of productivity change and develop a generalized method of moments strategy in which outputs or inputs may be endogenous we compare two methods in an application to electric utilities

examining the drivers of total factor productivity change with an illustrative example of 14 eu countries abstract based on the different models developed by korhonen and luptacik korhonen p luptacik m 2004 eco efficiency analysis of power plants an extension of data envelopment analysis european journal of operational research 154 437 46 this contribution centers on the development of an intertemporal comparison in order to analyze eco efficiency change over time in this setup two model variants by korhonen and luptacik 2004 are used in order to provide deeper insights concerning the driving forces for the change in the eco efficiency which bias in technical change can be observed is it more input saving or pollution reducing for illustration purposes the proposed approach is used to analyze the performance of 14 countries of the european union for the period 1995 2004 an average eco productivity growth of 22 is observed the estimated contribution of improved use of input is 20 and that of reduced relation of greenhouse gas emissions is 23 therefore it is concluded that on average the eco productivity growth is more driven by improved environmental conditions

green supply chain design a mathematical modeling approach based on a multi objective optimization model abstract increasing levels of industrialization of developed nations associated with globalization trends have been creating new challenges to supply chain management scm for decades the main focus of scm has been on efficient ways of managing the flows through complex networks of supplier producers and customers more recently and as a result of the exponential increase of energy and materials consumption rates of energy and materials sustainable development arise as an urgent issue and new approaches to scm are required to incorporate environmental and economic concerns in the design of supply chains in this paper a new green supply chain gsc design approach has been proposed to deal with the trade offs between environmental and financial issues in order to reduce negative impacts on the environment caused by the increasing levels of industrialization the new approach incorporates a closed loop network to accommodate the reprocessing paradigm of disposal products and a multi objective optimization mathematical model to minimize overall costs and carbon dioxide emissions when setting the supply chain optimization process is performed using three scalarization approaches namely weighted sum method weighted tchebycheff and augmented weighted tchebycheff computational results are analyzed to identify the advantages and drawbacks of each approach the model was tested in a case study and results allowed to identify the capability of the model to deal with the trade offs between the costs and environmental issues as well as to identify its main limitation when addressing real size problems

nash equilibrium in competitive insurance i formalize a rather stylized insurance market with adverse selection as a standard duopoly i formally specify demand functions and profits and prove that a nash equilibrium in pure strategies exists if and only if the well known rothschild stiglitz allocation is efficient

downsizing in the german chemical manufacturing industry during the 1990s why is small beautiful the german chemical manufacturing industry experienced major downsizing between 1992 and 2004 with the average size of firms shrinking by nearly half during this period this study uses modern frontier efficiency analysis to investigate the determinants of this downsizing based on reliable census data the results of this analysis suggest that firms were not primarily concerned with improving technical efficiency but with establishing an optimal scale of production the proportion of scale efficient firms has been persistently increasing and downsizing is found to be a rational conduct because all scale inefficient firms have continually operated under the decreasing returns portion of technology

technical efficiency and productivity analysis in indonesian provincial economies this article estimates inefficiency and total factor productivity tfp across indonesian provinces from 1993 to 2000 indonesia is a large emerging market economy but provinces within the country due to the island structure of the country are more distinct from one another compared to other countries we use a stochastic frontier methodology to estimate inefficiency and tfp we find that tfp fell by an average rate of 7 5 across provinces due to the decrease in technical efficiency in fact the majority of output growth within indonesia is explained by the accumulation of inputs in this sense economic growth within indonesia does not appear to be sustainable without reversing these trends

a game theoretic fundation of competitive quilibria with adverse selection we construct an extensive form game that captures competitive markets with adverse selection it allows firms to offer any finite set of contracts so that cross subsidization is not ruled out moreover firms can withdraw from the market after initial contract offers have been observed we show that a subgame perfect equilibrium always exists in fact when withdrawal is costless the set of equilibrium outcomes may correspond to the entire set of feasible contracts we then focus on robust equilibria that continue to exist for small withdrawal costs we show that the miyazaki wilson contracts are the unique robust equilibrium outcome

economic production quantity model for items with imperfect quality abstract the assumptions necessary to justify the use of economic production quantity epq eoq models are rarely met to provide mathematical models that more closely conform to actual inventories and respond to the factors that contribute to inventory costs the models must be extended or altered this paper hypothesizes a production inventory situation where items received or produced are not of perfect quality items of imperfect quality not necessarily defective could be used in another production inventory situation that is less restrictive process and acceptance control the electronics industry gives good examples of such situations this paper extends the traditional epq eoq model by accounting for imperfect quality items when using the epq eoq formulae this paper also considers the issue that poor quality items are sold as a single batch by the end of the 100 screening process a mathematical model is developed and numerical examples are provided to illustrate the solution procedure

malmquist type indices in the presence of negative data an application to bank branches in this paper we develop an index and an indicator of productivity change that can be used with negative data for that purpose the range directional model rdm a particular case of the directional distance function is used for computing efficiency in the presence of negative data we use rdm efficiency measures to arrive at a malmquist type index which can reflect productivity change and we use rdm inefficiency measures to arrive at a luenberger productivity indicator and relate the two the productivity index and indicator are developed relative to a fixed meta technology and so they are referred to as a meta malmquist index and meta luenberger indicator we also address the fact that vrs technologies are used for computing the productivity index and indicator a requirement under negative data which raises issues relating to the interpretability of the index we illustrate how the meta malmquist index can be used not only for comparing the performance of a unit in two time periods but also for comparing the performance of two different units at the same or different time periods the proposed approach is then applied to a sample of bank branches where negative data were involved the paper shows how the approach yields information from a variety of perspectives on performance which management can use

good and bad institutions is the debate over cross country firm level evidence from the textile industry using firm level data from nine developing countries we demonstrate that certain institutions like restrictive labour market regulations that are considered bad for economic growth might be beneficial for production efficiency whereas good business environment which is considered beneficial for economic growth might have an adverse impact on production efficiency we argue that our results suggest that there might be significant difference in the macro and micro impacts of institutional quality such that the classification of institutions into good and bad might be premature

sources of productivity growth using the fare primont decomposition an empirical application to the irish beef sector several competing methodologies for tfp estimation have been developed in the past decades a popular approach in the literature is index number computation the most widely implemented tfp indices

a game theoretic foundation of competitive equilibria with adverse selection we construct an extensive form game that captures competitive markets with adverse selection it allows firms to offer any finite set of contracts so that cross subsidization is not ruled out moreover firms can withdraw from the market after initial contract offers have been observed we show that a subgame perfect equilibrium always exists in fact when withdrawal is costless the set of equilibrium outcomes may correspond to the entire set of feasible contracts we then focus on robust equilibria that continue to exist for small withdrawal costs we show that the miyazaki wilson contracts are the unique robust equilibrium outcome

efficiency and productivity of the food and beverage listed firms in the pre recession and recessionary periods in greece this study uses data envelopment analysis to examine the liquidity and sales efficiency of the food and beverage listed firms in athens exchange in the period 2006 2012 the liquidity efficiency of the firms is higher than the sales efficiency but the results indicate that there are not statistical significant differences in the rankings estimated by the two models in each period the malmquist productivity index reveals that over the period of the study firms have experienced an annual average increase in productivity of 0 5 a slight progress on examining the components of this productivity change it becomes evident that firms have experienced an annual average of 2 increase in technology combined with a decrease in technical efficiency of 1 5 the results indicate that 52 4 of the firms experienced productivity gains in the examined period and this was mainly the result of technological gain rather than efficiency improvement more than 90 of the firms in the sample shift the efficiency fron

efficiency technical change and returns to scale in large us banks panel data evidence from an output distance function satisfying theoretical regularity abstract this paper provides parametric estimates of technical change efficiency change economies of scale and total factor productivity growth for large banks those with assets in excess of 1 billion in the united states over the period from 2000 to 2005 this is done by estimating an output distance function subject to theoretical regularity within a bayesian framework we find that failure to incorporate theoretical regularity conditions results in mismeasured shadow revenue and or cost shares which in turn leads to perverse conclusions regarding productivity growth our results from the regularity constrained model show that total factor productivity of the large us banks grew at an average rate of 1 98 over the sample period however our estimates also show a clear downward trend in the growth rate of total factor productivity and our decomposition of the primal divisia total factor productivity growth index into its three components technical change efficiency change and economies of scale indicates that technical change is the driving force behind this decline