Interior point methods for optimization have been around for more than 25 years now. Their presence has shaken up the field of optimization. Interior point methods for linear and (convex) quadratic programming display several features which make them particularly attractive for very large scale...

This article studies the role of social capital on cotton production efficiency and productivity for a sample of small farms in Maharashtra, India using data envelopment analysis. Input shadow prices are computed as an indicator of the importance of social capital relative to other inputs....

This paper fills a noticeable gap in the current economic and penology literature by proposing new performance-enhancing policies based on an efficiency analysis of a sample of male prisons in England and Wales over the period 2009/10. In addition, we advance the empirical literature by...

In this paper, we measure the performance for each of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation research centers by means of a Data Envelopment Analysis model. Performance data are available for a panel covering the period 2002–2009. The approach is instrumentalist, in the sense of...

We discuss how to properly decompose economic efficiency when the underlying technology is non-homothetic using alternative allocative and technical efficiency criteria. We first show that only under the production of one output and assuming the particular case of constant returns to scale...

This study measures the performance of participating nations at the Olympics, considering the quest for medals as a two-stage Olympic process. The first stage is characterized as athlete preparation (AP) and the second stage as athlete competition (AC). We extend the relational model from the...

Endogeneity, and the distortions on the estimation of economic models that it causes, is a usual problem in the econometrics literature. Although non-parametric methods like Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) are among the most used techniques for measuring technical efficiency, the effects of such...

Operational Research (OR) techniques have been applied, from the early stages of the discipline, to a wide variety of issues in education. At the government level, these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the...

It has recently been shown that the incorporation of weight restrictions in models of data envelopment analysis (DEA) may induce free or unlimited production of output vectors in the underlying production technology, which is expressly disallowed by standard production assumptions. This effect...