This paper considers the technical efficiency gains that have been achieved since privatisation of the British passenger railway. This is done through estimation of a stochastic efficiency frontier, with efficiency gains split between those arising through technical change and those arising out of management technical performance i.e. total factor productivity. The results suggest that most of ...

OBJECTIVE A collaborative project between Hull CHCP and Smith and Nephew wound management, which sought to enhance practice efficiency, specifically in relation to the optimisation of dressing change frequency. The project involved the use of a new foam dressing (Allevyn Life, Smith & Nephew, Hull) designed to manage wound exudate more effectively, be more acceptable to patients by masking stai...

There is a broad consensus that the costs of abatement of global climate change can be reduced efficiently through the assignment of quota rights, and through international trade in these rights. But there is no consensus on whether the initial assignment of emission permits can affect the Pareto-optimal global level of abatement. This paper provides some insight into the equity-efficiency puzz...

W present evidence on components of productivity change in the public accounting industry toward the end of the 20th century. Using revenue and human resource data from 64 of the 100 largest public accounting firms in the United States for the 1995–1999 period, we analyze productivity change, technical progress, and relative efficiency change over time. The average public accounting firm experi...

concurrent renewable energy production and wastewater treatment are two main reasons for using microbial fuel cells (mfcs). in this study, real wastewater was used for treating and power generation by air cathode microbial desalination cells (acmfc). the total duration of voltage generation by acmfc was about 151.9 ±23.2 h. the maximum voltage produced from municipal wastewater treatment was 27...

This study develops an applicable profit-oriented productivity indicator when producers pursue profit maximization and can recognize input and output prices. We define the indicator, inspired by the Luenberger indicator and the Nerlovian efficiency measurement, in terms of both quantity distance functions and profit. Hence, the study's first stage decomposes the profit-oriented productivity cha...

Scene change detection plays an important role in a number of video applications, including video indexing, searching, browsing, semantic features extraction, and, in general, pre-processing and post-processing operations. Several scene change detection methods have been proposed in different coding standards. Most of them use fixed thresholds for the similarity metrics to determine if there wa...

This paper proposes a two-dimensional efficiency decomposition (2DED) of profitability for a production system to account for the demand effect observed in productivity analysis. The first dimension identifies four components of efficiency: capacity design, demand generation, operations, and demand consumption, using Network Data Envelopment Analysis (Network DEA). The second dimension decompos...