This paper proposes a general formulation of a nonparametric frontier model introducingexternal environmental factors that might influence the production process butare neither inputs nor outputs under the control of the producer. A representation isproposed in terms of a probabilistic model...

Directional distances provide useful, flexible measures of technical efficiency of production units relative to the efficient frontier of the attainable set in input-output space. In addition, the additive nature of directional distances permits negative input or outputs quantities. The choice...

In this article we aim to analyze the relationship between a set of organizational extrinsic and intrinsic factors and the adoption of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) by privately-owned Portuguese organizations (large companies and small and medium enterprises). These factors are related to...

In the trend of globalization and coordination of banks, insurance and security companies, Taiwan life insurance industry has been facing tremendous competitive pressure. As a result of the shift from focusing on tangible resources to intangible resources, enterprises are seeking for gaining...

Traditional productivity measures have been much less prevalent than other measures of economic and biological performance in fisheries economics. It has been increasingly recognized, however, that mod eling and measuring fisheries’ production relationships is central to understanding and...

In rich countries, the population percentage under drug therapy for depressions is rising rapidly decade by decade for children, adolescent and young adults with no evidence of any long term success for this chronic ailment. There is also in rich countries relative to most poor ones, for each...

Governments are becoming increasingly aware of SMEs as economical role players. As a result many initiatives were introduced to address the unique challenges of the SME sector. One of these initiatives was the introduction of a global accounting framework for SMEs by the International Accounting...

Abstract The paper deals with the concepts of socio-cultural factors and performance of multinational companies. Multinational companies operate in different host countries around the world and have to deal with wide variety of economic, political, legal, socio-cultural and technological...

Benchmarking methods are widely used in the regulation of firms in network industries working under heterogeneous exogenous environments. In this paper we compare three recently developed estimators, namely conditional DEA (Daraio and Simar, 2005, 2007b), latent class SFA (Orea and Kumbhakar, 2004;...