Policy makers as well as land users in developed countries are willing to promote new agricultural practices that are more environmentally friendly. This can be possible notably among several others by reducing chemical utilization. For instance in France, the agreement of the “Grenelle de...

The model used, GAMEDE, is a “whole-farm” dynamic model composed of 6 biophysical modules and a management system (Vayssières et al, 2009). This simulation model gives accurate predictions for various sustainability indicators (labor, energy consumption, production, nitrogen leaks to the...

A rather simple but crucial question in economics and management is why one firm makes more profit than another. However the answer remains unclear because of the large range of factors that might explain differential profit. In this paper we propose a decomposition of the profit differential...

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....

Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, issues still remain regarding the mandated purchase of insurance to ensure more universal coverage. One such issue is the pricing of these insurance packages and whether or not the reimbursements will cover necessary services....

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...

In this paper, the Free Coordination Hull (FCH) approach developed by Green and Cook (2004) is combined with the Free Disposal Hull (FDH) model to detect potential gains from specialization. As a non-convex approach that allows both directly observed and summed decision making units (DMUs) to...