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

multiproduct short run hospital cost functions empirical evidence and policy implications from cross section data economists and policymakers have been interested in hospital costs and the structure of hospital technologies for several decades now early interest was focused on the possibility of scale economies which implied increased efficiency for larger hospitals 6 8 12 13 18 20 while more recent interest has been stimulated by the inflationary spiral of hospital costs 1 15 17 22 as hospital costs have risen important policy questions concerning the impact on costs of the hospitals diagnostic case mix the hospitals admitting physicians the hospitals size and the hospitals efficiency have emerged and researchers have attempted to deal with these issues within the context of increasingly complex econometric models 1 2 5 24 27 however in attempting to analyze these important policy issues researchers have been forced to make two major types of compromises on the one hand appropriate data are often not available for estimating a well specified cost function e g information on admitting physicians and diagnostic case mix are often missing so that problems of specification error often plague the econometric results conversely in using imaginative ways to deal with data problems e g weighting in patient and out patient care to form a single index of hospital services 1 27 or estimating separate cost functions for each department in the hospital 2 researchers sometimes place unrealistic and unnecessary constraints on their econometric models the purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of several of the primary hospital characteristics mentioned above on the short run costs of hospitals within a theoretically consistent framework in the following discussion we also develop the theoretical

profit incentives and technical efficiency in the production of nursing home care in recent years nursing home care expenditures have approached one percent of gnp their growth is a major contributor to the escalating costs of health care in this article the authors analyze a sample of nursing homes from wisconsin to determine the characteristics of the efficiently operated nursing homes data envelopment analysis is used to calculate efficiency scores for the various nursing homes in the sample the authors then use regression analysis to investigate the determinants of efficiency holding constant the characteristics of the output they find that for profit firms have significantly higher efficiency scores copyright 1989 by mit press

measuring hospital performance a non parametric approach abstract in this paper a technique for assessing the relative performance of firms is introduced and applied to a sample of hospitals in california hospitals are compared on the basis of their relative technical efficiency the reference technology is constructed from observed outputs and inputs including physicians using programming techniques and efficiency is assessed relative to the frontier of the technology using measures similar to those suggested by farrell the technique used here imposes no prespecified functional form allows for multiple outputs and inputs allowing for differences in case mix and yields information on the productive performance of individual hospitals this technique can also be used to determine whether different types of hospitals use different technologies our results although illustrative rather than definitive suggest that ownership affects efficiency as measured here public and nfp hospitals have different best practice frontiers and public hospitals appear to use relatively fewer resources these results could reflect differences in quality of care by ownership

hospital ownership and performance this study compares the performance of three ownership forms of hospitals for profit private nonprofit and public further classified according to whether or not the hospital is run by a hospital chain data come from a 1979 national survey of u s hospitals the authors find that hospital cost is quite similar among alternative ownership forms as is profitability the results do not provide much empirical support for standard property rights theory several reasons are suggested why this may be so

product introduction with network externalities the authors study the introduction of a new product in a market with network externalities there is a common presumption that such markets exhibit excess inertia i e that they are biased toward existing products in contrast the authors provide conditions under which equilibrium involves insufficient friction i e a tendency to rush into new incompatible technologies they also analyze the firms incentives to make their products compatible and they show that the firm introducing the new technology is biased against compatibility copyright 1992 by blackwell publishing ltd

analysis of productivity efficiency and technological changes in hospital services in ontario how does case mix matter abstract in this paper we compare productivity efficiency and technological changes with and without case mix as output categories using panel data on ontario hospitals for the period 2002 2006 we use the malmquist productivity index mpi data envelopment analysis dea and non parametric density estimation and related statistical tests we also decompose mpi into efficiency change ech and technological change tch we found that productivity efficiency and technological changes were significantly different between two alternative models with case mix as a weighting device model 2 and without case mix model 1 on the other hand adding case mix as a separate output model 3 did not have any significant impact on the distribution of efficiency estimates compared to the model without case mix we also found that in model 2 productivity growth was driven mainly by improvements in technology rather than increases in efficiency while in model 1 and model 3 the two effects ech and tch almost balanced each other leading to no productivity change

hospital technology in a nonmarket health care system 1 introduction the theoretical framework relating to the production of health services by hospitals is similar to that of any other firm economists are concerned with much the same issues in the measurement of output in the health sector as in other spheres of production foremost among these is the shape of the production function that underlies the transformation of inputs into outputs since it determines the optimal size and structure of the production unit in this case hospitals based on a 12 year panel of all short term hospitals in quebec covering 1981 through 1992 this research examines the health care production process the approach is new in that it examines hospitals in a noncompetitive socialized framework and relies on a very complete hospital sector data set to avoid biases often present in previous work all quasi fixed inputs physicians equipment and buildings all variable inputs labor drugs food for inpatients supplies energy and an aggregate of other inputs and all outputs inpatient care outpatient care food and laundry services sold to the public laboratory services to outpatients or under contract and teaching are included in the estimation determining the optimality of the hospital industry structure in quebec is important for at least two reasons first hospital investment decisions in quebec are centralized planners can determine the optimal hospital structure only if they have knowledge of the hospital production process second the absence of a competitive market precludes the usual adjustments driven by competitive pressures from taking place diseconomies of scope or scale highly unlikely in a competitive market might be present large and persistent in a nonmarket structure in quebec hospitals are most often private not for profit institutions however the quebec government that controls the national health insurance system is their only payer except for very small revenues from hospital private foundations or uninsured services such as cosmetic surgery some laboratory tests etc these private payments to hospitals represent negligible amounts as a result the system operates very much as if hospitals were in fact public entities collective bargaining occurs with the government reimbursement rates are determined by the government and major investment or merger decisions equipment purchase or new construction are approved by the government the present analysis provides a framework to gather information valuable to planners in any publicly funded system as they restructure hospital health services delivery in quebec the government could also better respond to changes in relative input prices through changes in relative input use review of its reliance on private laboratory analysis services or toughening of its medical school admissions policies in the early 1990s and without the benefit of an analysis such as this one the quebec government froze health care spending closed a number of hospitals changed hospitals role from short term care to long term care and decentralized its structure through regional boards regies regionales some of the unintended consequences included crowding in hospitals a near breakdown of emergency care during the first months of each year since and few if any gains in efficiency our analysis provides an exploration of the structure of hospital production in a nonmarket environment in anticipation of unavoidable restructuring of the industry in the years to come it also suggests a management tool for planners to direct the industry toward greater economic performance through changes in hospitals relative budgets changes in the scope of services offered or mergers between establishments this article examines the optimality of size diversification capitalization levels and technological change as well as the flexibility in the choice of inputs and outputs it identifies the hospital and delivery structure characteristics associated with greater performance

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

the efficiency of state owned and privatized firms does ownership make a difference abstract this paper compares the pre and post privatization efficiency of a sample of state owned enterprises privatized in spain with the efficiency of their closest private competitors we perform a two stage double bootstrap data envelopment analysis model in the first stage the efficiency is estimated through a bootstrapped data envelopment analysis and then followed in the second stage by a bootstrapped truncated regression our results provide evidence that i there were no significant differences in efficiency between the state owned enterprises and their private counterparts before privatization and ii the efficiency of newly privatized firms significantly increased after their privatization while private competitors showed no significant improvement during the same post privatization period

the effects of public capital on the productivity of the italian regions this article investigates the role played by public capital in increasing the productivity levels in italy for construction of the regional series for the public capital stock over the period 1996 to 2003 the study benefits from the use of the rich dataset on public expenditure recently published by the italian ministry of economy we have estimated panel production functions with the inclusion of traditional factors and also intangible inputs like research and development r d expenditure human capital hk and social capital sk the results point out that public capital has a positive and significant effect on production moreover the effects of all production factors vary considerably between the two macro areas of the country namely centre north and mezzogiorno more specifically while private capital is more effective in the south labour exhibits an elasticity much higher in the centre north with respect to the mezzogiorno the disaggregation of the public capital stock into functional cat

environmental kuznets curves real progress or passing the buck abstract recent research has examined the hypothesis of an environmental kuznets curve ekc the notion that environmental impact increases in the early stages of development followed by declines in the later stages these studies have focused on the relationship between per capita income and a variety of environmental indicators results imply that ekcs may exist for a number of cases however the measures of environmental impact used generally focus on production processes and reflect environmental impacts that are local in nature and for which abatement is relatively inexpensive in terms of monetary costs and or lifestyle changes significantly more consumption based measures such co2 emissions and municipal waste for which impacts are relatively easy to externalize or costly to control show no tendency to decline with increasing per capita income by considering consumption and trade patterns the author re examines the concept of the ekc and proposes the use of alternative consumption based measures of environmental impact the author speculates that what appear to be improvements in environmental quality may in reality be indicators of increased ability of consumers in wealthy nations to distance themselves from the environmental degradation associated with their consumption

the comparative efficiency performance of small and large us commercial banks in the pre and post deregulation eras the purposes of this paper are twofold first to employ a flexible non parametric approach to contrast the productive efficiency of a sample of small and large banks in order to examine the relationship between size and productive performance in the banking industry second to investigate whether the relative efficiency performance of small and large banks has changed following the changes in the banking environment in the 1980s and to contrast the rate of technological change achieved by these two groups of banks over this time period the findings based on group specific frontiers suggest that in the pre deregulation environment small banks were more efficient than the large banks while in the deregulated environment small and large banks were equally efficient moreover the dispersion in the efficiency measures of the small banks is found to have increased substantially while that of the large banks changed little over the sample period

measuring sectoral productivity across time and across countries abstract this paper examines the problem of measuring the evolution of productivity changes over time and across the 14 countries included in the oecd s international sectoral data base of two sectors considered essential to the economic growth of any nation namely manufacturing and services the basic units of analysis are generalized malmquist productivity indices these in turn can be decomposed into several components associated to the various sources of productivity change included here are productivity fluctuations due to economies of scale being constant or variable to technical change and technical efficiency change the computational procedure is based upon the concept of distance function computed through the use of variations of data envelopment analysis

technical efficiency and productivity change of china s iron and steel industry abstract the recent economic reform of china s iron and steel industry has resulted in its rapid expansion to become the largest in the world however the resultant increase in the use of energy and other resources has resulted in severe environmental degradation to further increase output while reducing emissions and waste will require increased productivity in this paper the technical efficiency and malmquist productivity indexes of a sample of 88 enterprises producing 72 percent of the industry s output were determined for the period 1989 1997 with the aim of gaining some insights into the policy options likely to achieve this

network effects software provision and standardization in this paper we examine the software provision decision of software firms the provision decision by software firms determines the value and hence the market share of competing hardware technologies we show how the provision decision by software firms determines whether multiple hardware technologies are supported in equilibrium or whether there is de facto standardization with only one hardware technology supplied with software in equilibrium we show that when consumers place a high value on software variety there is a suboptimal amount of standardization by the market

compatibility standardization and network effects some policy implications given the dramatic growth of the internet and information technology industries in general and the importance of interconnection in these networks the economics of compatibility and standardization has become mainstream economics in this paper i examine several key policy aspects of standard setting in industries with network effects copyright 2002 oxford university press

global effects of national biomass production and consumption austria s embodied hanpp related to agricultural biomass in the year 2000 global trade of biomass related products is growing exponentially resulting in increasing teleconnections between producing and consuming regions sustainable management of the earth s lands requires indicators to monitor these connections across regions and scales the embodied human appropriation of npp ehanpp allows one to consistently attribute the hanpp resulting from production chains to consumers hanpp is the sum of land use induced npp changes and biomass harvest we present the first national level assessment of embodied hanpp related to agriculture based on a calculation using bilateral trade matrices the dataset allows 1 the tracing of the biomass based products consumed in austria in the year 2000 to their countries of origin and quantifying the hanpp caused in production and 2 the assigning of the national level hanpp on austria s territory to the consumers of the products on the national level the dataset is constructed along a consistent system boundary between society and ecosystems and can be used to assess austria s physical trade balance in terms of ehanpp austria s ehanpp trade balance is slightly negative imports are larger than exports import and export flows are large in relation to national hanpp our findings show how the ehanpp approach can be used for quantifying and mapping the teleconnections related to a nation s biomass metabolism

adoptions and orphans in the early microcomputer market in this paper we examine the development of the microcomputer market in the early 1980s cp m a widely adopted operating system was orphaned by the user and the development communities a new operating system dos and a new hardware platform the ibm pc became the predominant industry standard we examine the statistical relationship between data that reflects hardware and software sales for the competing platforms we conclude that the economic processes underlying the development of dos differed from those underlying cp m and that many of these differences related to the role of software development

how does incompatibility affect prices evidence from atm s if consumers value mix and match combinations of network complements incompatibility between different sellers components should affect prices in atm markets a 1996 governance change exogenously generated such incompatibility by allowing banks to impose surcharges when other banks deposit customers use their atm s in our data incompatibility makes the relationship between deposit account pricing and own atm s more positive and makes the relationship between deposit account pricing and competitors atm s more negative the level effect on prices is positive the pattern of results is more pronounced in high population density markets where customers may care more about atm s

indirect network externality effects on product attributes indirect network externality ine effect exists when the utility of a product increases with the greater availability of compatible complementary products we demonstrate that ine effects can vary by product attributes with externality sensitive attributes gaining more from increased availability of complementary products than other attributes past research has assumed that the benefit of increased availability of complementary products e g software accrues to theentireproduct e g hardware utilizing data covering a period from 1985 to 1995 on compact disc player prices attributes and cd titles releases and using a hedonic price approach we find significant positive interactions between cd title availability and two attributes of the cd player namely changer capacity and its oversampling rate in addition to ine attribute interactions increased availability of cd titles is found to have a significant positive impact on the overall price of cd players which is consistent with past research collectively these effects of ine have helped reduce the yearly decline in the price of cd players the finding that ine effects differentially affect different attributes can help managers in decisions such as pricing timing of introduction and changing the levels of ine sensitive attributes

quantifying biodiversity footprints of dutch economic sectors a global supply chain analysis abstract economic sectors contribute to biodiversity loss via environmental pressures such as land use and greenhouse gas ghg emissions directly and via their supply chains this study is the first that systematically quantifies supply chain related environmental pressures and terrestrial biodiversity losses in relation to sectoral production by presenting so called biodiversity footprints for 47 sectors in the dutch economy the supply chains of the food and chemical sectors were investigated in more detail by applying a structural path analysis mean species abundance msa was used as a biodiversity indicator representing the degree of ecosystem naturalness our results revealed that i the largest supply chain related biodiversity losses occur in land intensive and energy intensive sectors ii sectors that produce primary resources such as crops and livestock showed the largest biodiversity footprint per eur of output iii for most sectors in the dutch economy more than 50 of the biodiversity losses related to their supply chains were being caused abroad and iv more than 45 of the supply chain related losses caused by the food and chemical sectors occurred upstream of the direct suppliers our results imply that mitigation of ghg emissions as well as land use related options should be considered in sectoral strategies to protect global biodiversity the results create a clear rational for not only improving sectoral production efficiency but also for taking supply chain responsibility supply chain related biodiversity losses often cannot be directly influenced by the sector or occur in other countries additional strategies may be needed then to reduce global biodiversity losses

the efficiency of nursing home chains data envelopment analysis is used to estimate technical efficiency in for profit independent and for profit chain nursing homes the empirical findings suggestceteris paribus that significant mult

frontier production functions and technical efficiency measures the concept of technical efficiency is central to measuring the firm performance the measurement of technical efficiency has proved difficult and complex and the literature provides a range of methodologies this paper reviews the various methodologies for measuring technical efficiency and offers a comparison between established methods of measurements the discussion is literary with less mathematical jargons and equations the objective of this paper is not to be exhaustive but to be up to date and to provide a significant discussion on some of the core methods of measuring technical efficiency

estimating efficiency in the hospital sector a comparison of three statistical cost frontier models this paper reports the results of an empirical comparison of three statistical cost frontier models using data from 49 spanish public hospitals the models estimated include the deterministic cost frontier a cross section stochastic cost frontier scf in which inefficiency is assumed to follow a half normal distribution and a panel data scf in which inefficiency is assumed to remain constant over time a non frontier model is also estimated the paper compares the estimates of average inefficiency obtained from the frontier models and the implied rankings of hospitals in terms of their costliness actual cost as a proportion of expected cost

is earth recognized as a finite system in corporate responsibility reporting abstract companies are increasingly encouraged to frame their sustainability activities and communication around ecological limits as captured by concepts such as planetary boundaries climate tipping points or regenerative capacity ecological limits may serve as scientific basis for defining environmental sustainability targets at the company level and moreover inspire companies to align their product portfolios with emerging societal needs related to sustainable transformations although corporate environmental reporting is widely researched little attention has hitherto been given to company use of the ecological limits concepts in stakeholder communication this study presents a comprehensive review of references made to ecological limits in corporate responsibility cr reports in 2000 2014 an exhaustive list of terms related to ecological limits was developed and used to search the corporateregister database which contained approximately 40 000 cr reports from this time period for every identified reference we analyzed the context in which the ecological limit term was used in the cr report we found a 10 fold increase in the number of references made to ecological limits in cr reports during the period 2000 2014 the number of cr reports published in this time period has also increased at a similar rate hence the proportion of companies referring to ecological limits in their cr reports has over the years remained stable roughly 5 the most commonly invoked ecological limits were related to climate change and references to 2 c were by far the most frequent the vast majority of companies referring to ecological limits did so without specific references to ongoing or planned changes in their activities as a consequence of recognizing these limits only a small percentage predominately high tech companies 31 in total explicitly used ecological limits to define targets for resource consumption emissions reductions and or as a stated reason for adjusting their product portfolio in defining targets for resource consumption or emissions only a few cr reports dealt explicitly with the issue of allocating resource and emission rights within ecological limits amongst companies and other actors a longitudinal study of three companies showed that these did not directly report progress towards planned changes based on ecological limits and offered explanations as to why some companies abandoned planned changes altogether our findings provide novel insights into the current use of the ecological limits concept by companies and may be useful for actors trying to motivate companies to align their activities with the finite nature of earth s natural systems

the efficiency of french regional airports an inverse b convex analysis abstract this paper analyses technical efficiency in french airports from 2005 to 2008 with the inverse b convex model this methodology is adopted permitting to relax the traditional convexity hypothesis common in dea data envelopment analysis literature the policy implications of the study is that french airport should upgrade their managerial procedures to cope with the frontier of best practices moreover non convex dea models should be adopted in the study of airports efficiency

complementary network externalities and technological adoption abstract we address the adoption of technology when there are network externalities and networks are characterized by complementary products produced by different firms we show that when the software firms are bertrand competitors a hardware technology with lower software development costs is adopted for many parameter values for which it is socially optimal to adopt the other technology the over adoption is due to a discrepancy between the private and social benefit of having a larger network

detecting unsustainable pressures exerted on biodiversity by a company application to the food portfolio of a retailer companies are called by institutional organizations to assess their impacts on biodiversity and to take actions to achieve collectively conservation objectives this paper presents a method to assess whether the pressures exerted by a business and its value chain on biodiversity are compatible with biodiversity conservation the absolute environmental sustainability assessment framework is used to compare relevant life cycle assessment midpoint and endpoint indicators to the ecological budgets assigned to the company this approach is illustrated based on the case study of a mass market retailer with a focus on the pressures exerted by its food portfolio at the agricultural production step the results indicate that several pressures driving biodiversity loss are not sustainable the study also highlights the prominent weight of a few product categories in the ecological burden these findings have implications for mass market retailers as well as their food value chains and open research perspectives to make such an approach fully operational

malmquist productivity index estimation with zero value variables the case of greek prefectural training councils abstract the paper suggests a technique for the parametric estimation of the malmquist productivity growth index when the dataset to be analyzed contains a considerable number of observations with zero values a dummy variable technique suggested by battese j agric econom 48 1997 250 is extended to a translog specification of the input distance function moreover technical changes tcs are decomposed into neutral and biased components and the sources of total productivity growth are computed via formulae explicitly accounting for the discrete nature of the data our approach has been applied to the greek prefectural training councils a state extension system for the general public findings indicate a considerably negative productivity growth primarily attributable to regressive tc

an empirical model of mainframe computer investment this paper introduces a dynamic model of investment decisions in mainframe computer systems i estimate and test the model using detailed micro data from a company in the telecommunications industry the model accounts for technological depreciation which distinguishes computers from other investment goods where physical depreciation is typically a key factor underlying replacement investment decisions the company increased its installed mainframe computer capacity by over 30 fold over the 10 year sample period part of this growth was undoubtedly due to the huge increase in performance and the corresponding drop in the per unit cost of processing capacity of mainframes a consequence of moore s law however there was also tremendous growth in the need for computers for billing account processing and other tasks due to the rapid growth in the telecommunications industry over this same time period i estimate the unknown parameters of the investment model using a nonlinear least squares nested fixed point algorithm nls nfxp which solves the bellman equation underlying the dynamic model of investment and replacement of mainframe computers by nonlinear least squares i demonstrate that it is feasible to estimate this model on an ordinary pc whereas standard discretization approaches to solving the firm s optimal investment policy might not even be feasible using supercomputers i show that the estimated model fits the data very well and accurately captures the large growth in installed mainframe capacity the timing and magnitude of replacement investment as well as periodic upgrades of existing mainframe units i use the model to decompose how much of the 30 fold increase in mainframe computer capacity is due to moore s law i e the huge drop in the unit cost of installed mainframe capacity and how much is due to the growth in demand for services of mainframes due to the rapid growth in demand for telecommunications services particularly cell phone accounts by the firm s customers copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

hospital efficiency and indigent care 1990 hospital efficiency and indigent care applied economics vol 22 no 11 pp 1597 1610

nursing home care in the netherlands a nonparametric efficiency analysis abstract this paper analyzes the technical efficiency of dutch nursing homes with respect to the use of labor inputs by means of data envelopment analysis dea in addition the determinants of the efficiency scores are investigated using censored regression analysis special attention is paid to checking the robustness of the results to using different versions of dea and to the econometric specification of the censored regression models fifty percent of the nursing homes are fully efficient according to the theoretically preferred frontier with constant or decreasing returns to scale there is some evidence of a trade off between labor input efficiency and the quality of care

technology adoption in the presence of network externalities we analyze technology adoption in industries where network externalities are significant the pattern of adoption depends on whether technologies are sponsored a sponsor is an entity that has property rights to the technology and hence is willing to make investments to promote it key findings include the following 1 compatibility tends to be undersupplied by the market but excessive standardization can occur 2 in the absence of sponsors the technology superior today has a strategic advantage and is likely to dominate the market 3 when one of two rival technologies is sponsored that technology has a strategic advantage and may be adopted even if it is inferior 4 when two competing technologies both are sponsored the technology that will be superior tomorrow has a strategic advantage

investigating productivity change and hospital size a nonparametric frontier approach the study obtains measures of the productive efficiency of larger and smaller northern ireland hospitals during the 1986 92 pre trust period the measures provide insights into how these hospitals were responding to the pressures for increased efficiency prior to trust status they also constitute a useful benchmark for evaluating productivity change under the post 1992 trust status environment a nonparametric frontier approach is used to measure productivity change and to decompose this into technical change or shifts in the best practice frontier and efficiency change or change in how far a hospital is from the frontier the latter change in efficiency is also decomposed into changes in scale efficiency pure technical efficiency and input congestion the findings indicate that smaller hospitals starting from a less efficient base achieved greater productivity gains than larger hospitals over 1986 92 for smaller hospitals this was due to progressive shifts in the best practice frontier outw

snowball a dynamic oligopoly model with indirect network effects abstract allowing for innovation dynamics in the software market this paper studies the conditions under which standardization in the hardware market arises and persists over time in the model software firms repeatedly invest in quality upgrades compete in the product market and make exit as well as entry decisions the results show that in general excess inertia does not occur a platform becomes the standard in a market only if it is better than the competing platforms furthermore low overall rates of innovation always lead to variety conversely the higher the speed of innovation the more likely standardization is

analysis of efficiency of the european postal sector abstract the aim of this paper is to analyse the productive change that has taken place in the postal sector of the european union using the malmquist index the productivity growth of european postal operators is broken up into two factors the variations in efficiency levels and the technical change the findings obtained show how the latter was responsible for the productivity growth experienced among the group of operators in the sample at the same time important inefficiencies and high dispersion across operators are observed

performance evaluation of the english premier football league with data envelopment analysis this paper uses data envelopment analysis dea to evaluate the performance of english premier league football clubs from 1998 99 to 2002 03 combining sport and financial variables the paper evaluates how close the clubs are relative to the frontier of best practices analysing how they manage sport as well as financial results managerial implications of the research are devised

operating system prices in the home pc market because the demand for os is a derived demand revealed through the demand for pcs and because its elasticity is relatively small the profit maximizing price of dos win that would result from a static equilibrium is much higher than the observed price we investigate this assertion empirically by fitting a differentiated products model of the home pc market to panel data of all pc brands sold in the g7 countries over the period 1995 1999 the results confirm that the low value of the aggregate elasticity of demand for pcs is the result of differentiation and substitution among pcs

dea malmquist productivity measure taiwanese semiconductor companies abstract in this research we employ data envelopment analysis dea to measure the malmquist productivity of semiconductor packaging and testing firms in taiwan from 2000 to 2003 malmquist productivity has three components the measurement of technical change the measurement of the frontier forward shift and the measurement of the frontier backward shift of a company over two consecutive periods this approach not only reveals patterns of productivity change and presents a new interpretation along with the managerial implication of each malmquist component but also identifies the strategy shifts of individual companies based upon isoquant changes therefore one can judge with greater accuracy whether or not such strategy shifts are favorable and promising we use slacks based measurement sbm and super sbm models to obtain more accurate measurements comparison is made between the results from sbm super sbm and ccr models

network effects without network externalities abstract the network externalities hypothesis postulates that consumers prefer to purchase brands which are bought by more consumers compared with brands with a low market share in this paper we show that increasing returns to scale in the production of complementary products can substitute for the network externalities assumption we develop a model for the computer industry in which the production of complementary software requires a large fixed cost of development relative to the cost of duplicating and marketing the software the increasing returns to scale in the production of software yields consumers behavior which is very similar to consumers who have preferences exhibiting network externalities

theorizing path dependence a review of positive feedback mechanisms in technology markets regional clusters and organizations the concept of path dependence has often been criticized as vague and only narrowly applicable although we can find some very refined definitions of the concept we also find a wide range of empirical phenomena being described as path dependent we argue that more detailed accounts of the positive feedback mechanisms that form paths can take path dependence beyond this state of being overdetermined but under specified reviewing three well described cases of path dependent dynamics in technology markets regional clustering and organizations we define a core set of positive feedback mechanisms that constitute path dependence at different analysis levels and clarify the relationship between positive feedback and increasing returns we show that path dependent processes that is processes driven by positive feedback that veer toward rigidity or lock in can be but do not have to be found under many labels including structural inertia coevolution or institutional persistence we conclude that a precise definition of path dependence does not need to be at odds with the concept s widespread use in understanding organizational and industrial development processes copyright 2013 the author 2012 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

competing technologies and market dominance standard battles in the local area networking industry the rise of fast ethernet as the dominant standard for high speed connection in the local area networking industry is chosen to study the interaction between increasing returns to adoption and technical change in innovation diffusion contrary to most of the empirical papers on diffusion with increasing returns which study competition between an entrenched technology and a new competitor the focus is on the case in which several and different versions of a new technology are competing at the same time for market dominance within this context this article studies under which conditions an early technology may fail to capitalise on its initial time advantage and a new version without a clear early lead may become dominant in particular we will consider a case in which the initial time advantage is made ineffective by consistently adverse technological expectations then we analyse how the arrival on the market of different categories of buyers sensitive to specific applications further contribute to weaken the early leader and strengthen a competing version this is more likely to occur when buyers are highly familiar with the characteristics of that specific version copyright 2008 oxford university press

a variable returns to scale data envelopment analysis model for the joint determination of efficiencies with an example of the uk health service a multi activity dea model for the joint determination of efficiencies with variable returns to scale is developed in this paper the model contains an element of complexity that is not present in the previous dea models for estimating returns to scale it is found that apparent overall efficiency may hide scale inefficiency in individual activities the model is applied to study the performance of individual specialties of national health services trusts in the uk it is argued that efficiency can be defined from two different perspectives either as the most efficient internal allocation of resources or the most efficient overall allocation of resources this distinction becomes important when looking at the efficiency of parts of inefficient dmus the relationship between size and returns to scale is also explored this method allows the determination of optimal size of an activity

airport activity and local development evidence from italy the role of infrastructure as a factor of growth and development of countries and regions is often considered to be crucial among the various types of transport infrastructure airports are considered as particularly strategic because of the increasing importance of air transport in connecting territories this paper studies the impact of airports on italian provinces to this end it builds on the framework proposed by brueckner where sectoral employment is regressed on a series of controls and on airline traffic that framework is extended to take account of selection bias due to the location choices of airports and spatial spillover effects it is found that the elasticity of service sector employment to airport passengers is 0 045 and that of spillover effects due to neighboring airports is almost 0 017

technological competition and the structure of the computer industry we examine thirty years of computer industry market structure our analysis explains the persistence of dominant computer firms their recent decline and the changing success of competitive entry it emphasizes the importance of technological competition between computer platforms not firms this aspect of competition has changed little over time two things did change young platforms serving newly founded segments eventually challenged established platforms across segment boundaries through a process of indirect entry vertically disintegrated platforms have led to divided technical leadership in important segments the result is an industry with far more technological competition

what does it really mean to be a strongly sustainable company a response to nikolaou and tsalis abstract in a recent issue of this journal nikolaou and tsalis 2018 published a paper titled a framework to evaluate eco and social labels for designing a sustainability consumption label to measure strong sustainability impact of firms products in their paper the authors n t develop a method for identifying strongly sustainable companies as a basis for consumer communication n t test their method on a case study of five chemical companies and conclude that two of these are strongly sustainable essentially because they had obtained a higher number of eco labels than the average across the five companies while we agree with n t on the relevance of applying a strong sustainability perspective in the assessment of companies we are afraid that their method can lead to misguided consumer communication at the root of this concern is that n t 1 use a market average as reference to decide whether a company has a strong or weak sustainability performance and 2 use the number of eco labels as an environmental indicator we lay the foundation of this response by briefly accounting for the academic origin of the weak strong sustainability dichotomy we then present our argument against the method presented by n t this is followed by a proposal for how to improve the method finally we discuss state of the art in strong sustainability assessments of companies taking into account other existing methods that draw on the planetary boundaries concept and life cycle assessment

a comparative application of data envelopment analysis and translog methods an illustrative study of hospital production this paper compares inferences about hospital cost and production correspondences from two different estimation models 1 the econometric modeling of the translog cost function and 2 the application of data envelopment analysis dea while there are numerous examples of the application of each approach to empirical data this paper provides insights into the relative strengths of the estimation methods by applying both models to the same data the translog results suggest that constant reruns are operant whereas the dea results suggest that both increasing and decreasing returns to scale may be observed in different segments of the production correspondence in turn suggesting that the translog model may be averaging diametrically opposite behavior on the other hand by examining the rate of output transformation both models agree that patient days devoted to care of children are more resource intensive than those devoted to adults or to the elderly in addition we compare estimates of technical efficiencies of individual hospitals obtained from the two methods the dea estimates are found to be highly related to the capacity utilization but no such relationship was found for the translog estimates this comparative application of different estimation models to the same data to obtain inferences about the nature of underlying cost and production correspondences sheds interesting light on the strengths of each approach and suggests the need for additional research comparing estimation models using real as well as simulated data

frontier estimation how useful a tool for health economics the journal is pleased to publish in this issue three papers that apply frontier estimation techniques to hospitals and nursing homes together with an exchange over the usefulness of those techniques in the health care context the papers represent the current state of the art with respect to applications of frontier estimation in health care because of the growing popularity of the technique no doubt in part from its availability in standard software packages it seems useful to take this opportunity to appraise its usefulness one might begin by asking usefulness for what assuming one could define a frontier with certainty how would one use such knowledge a straightforward application in health care appears to be to reimbursement because both data envelopment analysis dea and stochastic frontier estimation specify the least cost mix of inputs for a given output both methods can in principle be used to determine whether a given firm hospital or nursing home is efficient and if the answer to that question is no the magnitude of any inefficiency it is not a large step from that information to the notion that a regulator should reduce the firm s budget by the amount of the measured inefficiency indeed vitaliano and toren mention the boren amendment s requirement that the medicaid program reimburse hospitals and nursing homes at the cost incurred by an efficiently operated

bootstrapping the malmquist indexes for italian airports abstract this paper uses data envelopment analysis to assess the operational performance of 28 italian airports during the period of 2000 through 2006 recent developments in bootstrapping techniques are used to correct total factor productivity estimates for bias and to assess the uncertainty surrounding such estimates this study found that the italian airport industry experienced a significant technological regress with few airports achieving an increase in productivity led by improvements in efficiency moreover the paper shows that the form of ownership public majority vs private majority of an airport management company does not significantly affect performance in contrast this type of the concession agreement has positive and significant effects on airport productivity finally the paper highlights the existence of a productivity gap between airports located in the north central part of the country and those located in the south

an international comparison of hospital efficiency does institutional environment matter the consensus among many health economists is that no meaningful performance differences exist among for profit and non profit hospitals in the us but this topic has continued to be a matter of academic judicial and public policy interest a similar debate has ensued internationally regarding the potential efficiency gains from privatization of public enterprises in this paper we examine empirical evidence from the public highly regulated norwegian hospital sector and the private highly competitive and unregulated california hospital sector to ascertain whether institutional environment and level of market competition significantly affect the degree of productive efficiency in hospitals we compare and discuss the productive efficiency of four similar sets of hospitals operating in different institutional and competitive environments the four samples are carefully matched in the dimensions of sample size hospital size and average lengths of stay heterogeneity in output definition is used to co

privatization and efficiency differentiating ownership effects from political organizational and dynamic effects this paper argues that the private public ownership factor should be differentiated from other factors that also influence the effect of privatization on efficiency this is empirically confirmed in a longitudinal study of 24 spanish firms for which several political and organizational factors are found to influence the estimated effects of privatization on efficiency the analysis of the timing of the effects reveals a strong significance for post privatization years 5 6 negative and 7 8 positive this suggests that the negative effect of these factors is transitional being eventually offset by the positive effects of the change to private ownership 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved jel classification l33

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

sensitivity analysis for dea models an empirical example using public vs nfp hospitals abstract the research presented here applies the data envelopment analysis dea to a sample of public government owned and not for profit hospitals operating in michigan in 1982 the focus of this research is twofold first assessing the relative efficiency between these two ownership types using the dea rather than cost or profit functions can add insights into the production practices of these two ownership forms of hospitals second testing the sensitivity of the dea will add credence to this approach and resulting measures ten different specifications of the dea are employed to test the sensitivity of the model

measuring production efficiency of acute hospitals in scotland 1991 94 validity issues in data envelopment analysis data envelopment analysis is a potentially useful technique for measuring production efficiency and is being increasingly applied to health care services as with other areas however some fundamental concerns need to be addressed before data envelopment analysis can be accepted widely as a routine tool these include issues of validity and specification error this paper suggests a broad framework for assessing validity which should be developed further and gives illustrative examples of the problems in a real application within health care data from 75 scottish acute hospitals for three years from 1991 94 are analysed internal validity is assessed by examining the effect on the results obtained of the choice of inputs and outputs selected for analysis external validity is assessed by examining differences in the results obtained from the data for each of the three years in both cases it is concluded that there is a disturbing lack of concordance between the different results obtained caution mu

assessing the technical and allocative efficiency of hospital operations in greece and its resource allocation implications abstract in this paper we seek to develop a research framework concerning the assessment of the efficiency of public sector hospital operations public hospitals are increasingly under pressure to improve their operations both in terms of resources they use and also in terms of the quantity and quality of their outcomes the assessment of efficiency entails both the notions of technical and allocative efficiency as they yield complementary information about the management effectiveness of individual hospitals technical efficiency has a diagnostic purpose as it yields comparative information about the effectiveness with which individual units convert their input resources into outputs on the other hand allocative efficiency has a planning orientation since the objective of the assessment is to gauge efficiency improvements by means of resource reallocation a linear programming based model is proposed for assessing allocative efficiency in the light of uncertainty about the prices of input factors the empirical part of the paper is based on data from greek public hospitals results and policy implications are discussed based on data from 98 general hospitals based on information from 1992 it was found that significant inefficiencies are present in the operations of greek hospitals that account approximately for 100 mecu in 1992 prices

does the adoption of new technology boost productive efficiency in the public sector the case of icus system abstract in the last decade a significant amount of financial resources has been devoted by the greek government and the european union to provide the intensive care units icu of the greek public health care system with high tech medical equipment in order to improve their productive efficiency using a unique data set we employ the dea bootstrap of simar and wilson 2007 approach to estimate the efficiency of each icu and to explore the impact of these investments on their efficiency our results indicate that although the technical efficiency is benefited from the embodiment of new medical technology the scale efficiency remains unaffected the role of the asymmetric information of the icus proximity to pools of knowledge and of the composition of the medical personnel seems to be the crucial factors for the improvement of their productive efficiency

a goal programming method of stochastic allocative data envelopment analysis abstract allocative data envelopment analysis adea is a version of data envelopment analysis dea which measures relative efficiency for a group of similar operating units with known input prices by using the actual input values adea provides information to managers on the minimum cost method of operation for each unit a major criticism of dea methods is that they are deterministic and have no means of allowing for uncertainty this paper applies the goal programming approach introduced by banker 1991 to allocative efficiency and develops the stochastic adea model a two stage solution method is introduced which is needed because of the existence of alternate optimal solutions regarding which units are found to be significantly inefficient we propose that identifying the significantly inefficient units is most useful to managers because it best facilitates improved efficiency the concept of a minimum frontier is introduced and used to define the significantly inefficient units we also show how bounds can be imposed which allow the ambiguity of the noise inefficiency trade off to be eliminated from the objective function the use of bounds also allows the identification of the significantly inefficient unit based on the amount of uncertainty present for each operating unit as a result of optimizing cost this method has the important advantage of being ideally suited for multiple outputs