Managerial efficiency is as important in social profit enterprises (SPEs) as it is for more traditional financial-profit organizations. In this regard, both donors and SPE executives use efficiency information in making decisions. Here, we suggest a linked, two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis...

This paper presents a class of utility functions (class A_\infty) that contains all of the utility functions commonly used for mathematical modeling: the class consisting of those utility functions whose derivatives alternate in sign. A simple representation via mixtures of exponential utilities...

This paper presents a definitive description of neural network methodology and provides an evaluation of its advantages and disadvantages relative to statistical procedures. The development of this rich class of models was inspired by the neural architecture of the human brain. These models...

An examination of the efficiency of the marketing distribution channel and organizational structure for insurance companies is presented from a framework that views the insurer as a financial intermediary rather than as a "production entity" which produces "value added" through loss payments....

This study examines the effect of the statistical/mathematical model selected and the variable set considered on the ability to identify financially troubled life insurers. Models considered are two artificial neural network methods (back-propagation and learning vector quantization (LVQ)) and...