While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has raged for decades, in all of its ramifications there has never been a totally structured or scientific approach to the conflict with all of its details. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) approaches the problem along these lines. There are a plethora...

Quality credit has attracted considerable interest in both academia and business world in recent years in China. This study aims to discuss the development of quality credit evaluation system, and then based on an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to construct an evaluation system for Internet...

The financial services industry is the major investor in information technology in the U.S. economy; the typical bank spends as much as 15% of non-interest expenses on IT. A persistent finding of research into the performance of financial institutions is that performance and efficiency vary...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has been widely studied in the literature since its inception in 1978 and is a key analytical technique used in Wharton's performance analysis for retail delivery systems. The methodology behind the classical DEA, the oriented method, is to hold inputs (outputs)...

Call centers are quickly becoming the major point of contact for serving customers and generating new revenue in a variety of industries. No where is this growth in the importance of call centers more apparent than in the financial services industry. This paper presents the results of a survey...

This case study in retail banking reviews the work of a Wharton School research team which has been tracking the process of change at one of the larger American commercial banks. The bank is referred to by the pseudonym "National Bank." The team's research focuses on how a bank chooses what...

This chapter summarizes a multi-year research effort to understand the role of process performance in the overall efficiency of banks. By focusing on the process as the unit of analysis, the authors consider how technology, human resources, and most importantly, the interaction between these...

This paper develops methods to compute performance measures in a specific type of loss system with multiple classes of customers sharing the same processor. Such systems arise in the modeling of a call center, where the performance measures of interest are blocking the probability of a call and...