Efficiency evaluation of a Decision Making Unit (DMU) involves two issues: 1) selection of an appropriate reference plan against which to evaluate the DMU and 2) measurement of performance slack. In the literature, these issues are mixed in one and the same operation but we argue that it has...

In this paper, we suggest that inefficiency may be an indirect, on-the-job compensation to agents in an organization. We show how to use actual production data to reveal the trade-offs between different inefficiencies (slacks). Moreover, we discuss how to use this to improve productivity...

We introduce simple production economic models to estimate the potential gains from mergers. We decompose the gains into technical efficiency, size (scale) and harmony (mix) gains, and we discuss alternative ways to capture these gains. We propose to approximate the production processes using...

Multi-period multi-product regulatory schemes for electricity distributors are presented, based on cost information from a productivity analysis model and an agency theoretical decision model. The proposed schemes are operational and demonstrate considerable advantages compared to the popular...

The productivity analysis literature has traditionally focused on the evaluation of past performances. In this paper, we consider the post productivity analysis problem of deciding which production plans to choose in the future given information from a productivity analysis. In particular, we...