This paper investigates cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals. More specifically, it deals with the question how hospital efficiency varies with ownership, patient structure, and other exogenous factors, which are neither inputs nor outputs of the production process. We conduct a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) on a multifaceted administrative German dataset combined with the balanc...

Nowadays, Internet makes it easy for us to share all kinds of information. However, violent content in web has harmful influence on those who lack proper judgment, especially teenagers. This paper presents an approach for detecting violence in videos, where Discriminative Slow Feature Analysis (D-SFA) is introduced to learn slow feature functions from dense trajectories derived from videos. Aft...

The main objectives of this paper are to measure the technical efficiency levels of Iranian banks and to investigate the degree of factors influence on the efficiency in these banks. Stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) methods are applied to bank-level data over 22 years (from 1995 to 2011). We find that publicly-owned banks obtain average technical efficiencies of 0.73, which is lower than priv...

A beginning to deal with denoising the signals specifically the images is proposed by reconstructing the conventional mechanism. Various constituents of the overall scope are chosen, from each of which a signal can be rebuilt using a Singularity Function Analysis (SFA) model. The concept thus accomplishes denoising by reconstructing the images using the reality that each is the sum of the same ...

 This study evaluated the relative effects of Tier II computer-assisted tutoring in small groups (Team Alphie) and one-to-one tutoring provided to struggling readers in 33 high-poverty Success for All (SFA) schools. In this year-long study, struggling readers in the Team Alphie schools were tutored in groups of 6. In the control schools, students were tutored using the standard oneto-on...

Product variety is an important component of consumer welfare, yet many markets have historically been dominated by a small number of best-selling products. The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, describes this common pattern of sales concentration. However, by greatly lowering search costs, information technology in general and Internet markets in particular have the potential to ...

Sales force deployment involves the concurrent resolution of four interrelated subproblems: sizing the sales force, salesman location, sales territory alignment, and sales resource allocation. The rst subproblem addresses the topic of selecting the appropriate number of salesman. The salesman location aspect of the problem involves determining the location of each salesman in one sales coverage...

Li, Jiayu. M.S., Purdue University, May 2015. Tracking Sales Activities in Agribusiness. Major Professor: W. Scott Downey. Decisions in the sales area, including customer and product selection and margin discipline, shape profits for companies in agribusiness. Management of the sales function takes place at the organizational, managerial, and practitioner level, each of which requires data abou...