The issue of quality and its relationship with efficiency and performance is a crucial operational issue in many fields of study including production economics, operations research, engineering and business management. In this paper we provide a methodology for identifying latent quality...

Simar and Wilson (J. Econometrics, 2007) provided a statistical model that can rationalize two-stage estimation of technical efficiency in nonparametric settings. Two-stage estimation has been widely used, but requires a strong assumption: the second-stage environmental variables cannot affect...

The explanation of productivity differentials is very important to identify the economic conditions that create inefficiency and to improve managerial performance. In literature two main approaches have been developed: one-stage approaches and two-stage approaches. Daraio and Simar (2003)...

Nonparametric methods have been widely used for assessing the performance of organizations in the private and public sector. The most popular ones are based on envelopment estimators, like the FDH or DEA estimators, that estimate the attainable sets and its efficient boundary by enveloping the...