Agricultural inputs are peculiar in nature as an asymmetry in their roles can be identified during the production process. These inputs can be grouped into a set of growth inputs or a set of facilitating inputs. The inputs affecting biological or physiological growth from the inside of the plant...

Research on productive efficiency at the firm level has developed as an important and active strand of research the last decades, both within operations research, management science and economics. However, the interests pursued within the fields have had some differences regarding sound...

Based on the seminal paper of Farrell (1957), researchers have developed several methods for measuring e fficiency. Nowadays, the most prominent representatives are nonparametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) and parametric stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), both introduced in the late 1970s....

In this study, we address a major problem in the measurement of firm performance and the regulation of natural monopolies, namely the intertemporal character of long-term investment decisions. In specific, we focus on the impact of adjustment costs of investments on estimates of firms’...

Regulatory authorities in the European electricity sector use benchmarking techniques to determine the cost-efficient production level for an incentive regulation of distribution system operators (DSOs). With nearly 900 DSOs operating in the German electricity sector, of which 200 subject to...

We discuss the nonparametric approach to profit efficiency analysis at the firm and industry levels in the absence of complete price information, and propose two new insights. First, choosing one commodity (whose price is known) as a numeraire good enables us to measure profit inefficiency in...

This paper analyses the role of institutions in enhancing the economic efficiencies across countries in a two stage Double Bootstrap DEA framework based on nonparametric frontier analysis as proposed by Simar and Wilson (2007). In the first stage, cross country workers' efficiency is estimated...

Although financial indicators are most often used to measure organizational efficiency, contemporary research suggests that more consideration should be given to non-material factors that can be enveloped by different non-parametric techniques. However, there is no method powerful enough to...

Non-parametric evaluation of returns to scale of production units in standard DEA models becomes problematic when their underlying technologies involve negative data. The methodology recently offered by Allahyar and Rostamy-Malkhalifeh (2015) (hence after called ARM model) is of some help to...

This article provides a generalization of the materials balance-based production model introduced by Coelli et al. (2007). Based on this, some new environmental efficiency (EE) measures are presented. The Coelli et al. (2007) EE measure and its extension by Rødseth (2016) produce biased...