Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is known as a non-parametric method to evaluate the relative efficiencies of a set of homogenous decision-making units (DMUs) (i.e., banking, health, education, etc.) that use multiple inputs to produce multiple outputs. DEA models also have applications for...

With the changing business environment, the ability of the traditional costing system to provide accurate and useful information to management about costs of products or services has decreased and hence, modern costing systems, like activity-based costing (ABC) are developed to overcome the...

This descriptive paper analyses structural characteristics of Finnish university departments (FIDs) and benchmarks them against foreign university departments from Scandinavia, the UK and the US (FODs). In the first place the study aims to reveal information on differences in department size. In...

This paper shows through the combination of output-orientated data envelopment analysis (DEA) with the calculation of Malmquist indexes that the obvious and persistent differences in growth and levels of per capita income and labour productivity between the German states are less caused by...

In this article an application-oriented approach to analyze the cost of conformance of services, i. e. ‘cost of customer satisfaction’, is presented. Contrary to quality costing methods in manufacturing industries, which are concerned about objective quality standards, services have to...

This paper examines technical and pure technical efficiencies of ten major financial institutions in Botswana for each year during the period 2001-2006 using data envelopment analysis. In order to obtain more robust and reliable results, the sensitivity of our efficiency indices were put into...

With the enforcement of the Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC (WFD), policy makers are required to pursue the improvement of the use efficiency of the water resources in the agricultural sector. For this purpose, we suggest a methodology to perform an ex-ante analysis of the efficiency of...

This article discusses models in data envelopment analysis (DEA) relaxing the standard convexity assumptions. The basic model treats mutually incomparable pairs of sets to be generated by a procedure proposed earlier. Each pair consists of a consumption set and a production set of feasible...

A major challenge to legislators, insurance providers and municipalities will be how to manage the reimbursement of health-care on partially open markets under increasing fiscal pressure and an aging population. Although efficiency theoretically can be obtained by private solutions using...

This paper presents a statistical framework for estimating output-specific efficiencies for the 2-output case based upon a DEA frontier estimate. The key to the approach is the concept of target output-mix. Being usually unobserved, target output-mixes of firms are modelled as missing data....