This thesis presents a number of methodological developments that were raised by a real life application to measuring the efficiency of bank branches. The advent of internet banking and phone banking is changing the role of bank branches from a predominantly transaction-based one to a...

This paper uses a meta-Malmquist index for measuring productivity change of the water industry in England and Wales and compares this to the traditional Malmquist index. The meta-Malmquist index computes productivity change with reference to a meta-frontier, it is computationally simpler and it...

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...

Neuron activity presents two timescales, a fast one related to action-potential spiking, and a slow timescale in which bursting takes place. Bursting activity in neuron ensembles can be synchronized, meaning the adjustment of the bursting phases due to coupling. We investigated bursting...

In for-profit organizations efficiency measurement with reference to the potential for profit augmentation is particularly important as is its decomposition into technical, and allocative components. Different profit efficiency approaches can be found in the literature to measure and decompose...

We considered a coupled chaotic logistic map lattice exhibiting the scale-free property: the outreach connectivity of each node obeys a power-law distribution. We analyzed a weak form of coherent spatio-temporal behavior (direction coherence) which presents features common to completely...

The efficiency literature, both using parametric and non-parametric methods, has been focusing mainly on cost efficiency analysis rather than on profit efficiency. In for-profit organisations, however, the measurement of profit efficiency and its decomposition into technical and allocative...