In the literature, two main ratio-based productivity indices have been defined in terms of a primal technology notion. While the Malmquist productivity index has become very popular, it has the problem that it is not always well-defined. By contrast, the less popular Hicks Moorsteen productivity...

Quite a few studies have considered efficiency at the bank branch level by comparing mostly a single branch network, while an abundance of studies have focused on comparing banking institutions. However, to the best of our knowledge no study has ever assessed performance at the level of the...

The main aim of this contribution is to compare existing and newly developed techniques for geometrically representing mean-variance-skewness portfolio frontiers based on the rather widely adapted methodology of polynomial goal programming (PGP) on the one hand and the more recent approach based...

This note shows how the linear programs needed to compute cost and revenue functions under constant returns to scale and a single output or input, respectively, can be replaced with a more efficient enumeration algorithm. An empirical illustration shows the gain in computer time one can obtain.

The need to adapt Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and other frontier models in the context of negative data has been a rather neglected issue in the literature. Silva Portela, Thanassoulis, and Simpson (2004) proposed a variation on the directional distance function, a very general distance...

The literature suggests that investors prefer portfolios based on mean, variance and skewness rather than portfolios based on mean-variance (MV) criteria solely. Furthermore, a small variety of methods have been proposed to determine meanvariance-skewness (MVS) optimal portfolios. Recently, the...

This contribution provides a way to define and compute a tangency notion of economic capacity based upon the relation between the various directional distance functions and the profit and cost functions using non-parametric technologies. A new result relating profit and cost function-based...

There is a burgeoning literature using non-parametric frontier methods to measure mutual fund performance. These articles measure the relationship between the various characteristics (mainly return information and some costs of ownership) of these specialized financial products to establish a...

The shortage function has been proposed as a tool to gauge portfolio performance in multi-moment portfolio models. An open issue is how the choice of direction vector affects the efficiency measurement and, from a practical point of view, the resulting league tables. This paper illustrates...

Starting from existing static decompositions of overall economic efficiency on non-parametric production and cost frontiers, this paper proposes more comprehensive decompositions including several cost-based notions of capacity utilisation. Furthermore, in case prices are lacking, we develop...