Background Public district hospitals (PDHs) in Tunisia are not operating at full plant capacity and underutilize their operating budget. Methods Individual PDHs capacity utilization (CU) is measured for 2000 and 2010 using dual data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach with shadow prices input...

In a paper published by Ma (1994) it was argued that the prospective payment system in the hospital industry was superior to the cost based reimbursement system to achieve both cost reduction and quality improvement objectives. In the analysis, it was assumed that quality and costs decisions...

In a recent paper Kuosmanen and Matin (2011) have developed a dual formulation of the weakly disposable Kuosmanen’s technology (Kuosmanen, 2005). Their work sheds new light on the economic interpretation of weak disposability and allows estimation of shadow prices for undesirable/bad outputs....

This paper analyzes the relationship between the comparative advantages of bank branches and the trade area environment. Bank branches are points of sale whose trade environment influences their activities and performance. Comparative advantages are defined, for each output mix, by the strict...

In this paper, we apply a standard model of performance evaluation to the retail banking industry. In this framework, the global economic performance is broken down into technical efficiency related to the optimal use of resources and price efficiency related to the optimal choice of a...

We extend the standard frontier efficiency models (data envelopment analysis [DEA] and stochastic frontier analysis [SFA]) by allowing the “decision making units” (DMUs) whose performances are assessed to consist of two different levels within hierarchical organizations. Generally, the lower...

Hospital productivity has been a research topic for over two decades. We expand on this research to include measures of dis/economies of scope. By using the Free Coordination Hull (FCH) we are able to determine if hospitals in our sample can become more efficient if they provide more services...

The duality between measures of economic and technical efficiency has been extensively studied in the productive efficiency analysis. This duality ensures a meaningful interpretation of technical efficiency as economic efficiency evaluated at the most favorable shadow prices. This paper...