Modern agricultural marketing cooperatives must implement farm-level differentiation to meet requirements from high-quality market segments, e.g. consumers focusing on animal welfare. This makes the cooperatives internally heterogeneous and increases the influence costs. In particular, the...

We analyse how to design incentive schemes for agents producing information. The agents may, for example, be divisional managers, market researchers, OR consultants, financial analysts, corporate auditors, research scientists or political pollsters. We show that an agent should be compensated...

In a recent paper, Petersen (Petersen, N. C. 1990. Data envelopment analysis on a relaxed set of assumptions. Management Sci. 36 305--314.) proposed to relax the convexity assumptions invoked in traditional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Unfortunately, the new approach is not consistent with...

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...

This paper provides a new and systematic characterization of 488 universities, from 11 European countries: Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and UK. Using micro indicators built on the integrated Aquameth database, we characterize the...

In this paper, we examine how empirical production frontiers may contribute to the incentives of production units. We consider a series of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) frontiers, and we show when these may be incentive efficient in the sense that they contain all the information that are...

In this paper we characterize the smallest production possibility set that contains a specified set of (input, output) combinations. In accordance with neoclassical production economics, this possibility set has convex projections into the input and output spaces (convex isoquants), and it...

We investigate how different competitive regimes affect the ability to provide incentives based on noisy information systems. The set-up involves multiple producers and processors in the presence of moral hazard and adverse selection. Reduced competition may facilitate incentive provision by...