Research on productive efficiency at the firm level has developed as an important and active strand of research the last decades, both within operations research, management science and economics. However, the interests pursued within the fields have had some differences regarding sound...

Attempts can be found in the DEA literature to identify returns to scale at efficient interior points of the production possibility set on the basis of returns to scale at points of the corresponding reference sets. However, an opposite approach is put forward in this paper, advocating that...

Most nations spend a considerable part of their gross domestic product (GDP) on defense. However, no previous study has addressed the productivity and efficiency of the core area of the armed forces, operational units, using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Introducing a model for the production...

The modelling of the interaction between production activities and the natural environment requires formulating a multioutput production function for intended and unintended outputs. The key feature when modelling joint production of intended outputs and unintended residuals is that the latter...

Studies of productivity growth of institutions of higher education is of interest for two main reasons; education is an important factor for productivity growth of the economy, and in countries where higher education is funded by the public sector accountability of resource use is of key...

The ability of public sector policy makers to prioritize has a huge impact on the effectiveness of public service provision. Public services can take the form of final outputs demanded by consumers or of intermediate outputs contributing to a process of realizing the higher goals of society. In...