The Japanese electricity industry has experienced regulatory reforms since the mid-1990s. This article measures productivity in Japan’s steam power-generation sector and examines the effect of reforms on the productivity of this industry over the period 1978–2003. We estimate the Luenberger productivity indicator, which is a generalization of the commonly used Malmquist productivity index, usin...

“Kriging” is the name of a parametric regression method used by hydrologists and mining engineers, among others. Features of the kriging approach are that it also provides an error estimate and that it can conveniently be employed also to estimate the integral of the regression function. In the present work, the kriging method is described and some of its statistical characteristics are explore...

The main challenge for sustainable development of resource cities is to work out a feasible strategy for transformation processes. This paper introduces a new approach for analysis of transformation performance. Using the environmental production technology and a Malmquist resource performance index (MRPI), we conduct σ , absolute β and conditional β convergence tests for the transformation per...

This study examines the productivity changes of decision making units in situation where input price vectors are varying between them and inputs are heterogeneous; that is a noncompetitive market. We present a directional measure of cost Malmquist productivity index where incorporates the decision maker's preference over productivity change over time. A simple numerical example is designed to i...

We present a Bayesian decision theoretic approach for developing replacament strategies. In so doing, we consider a semi-parametric model to describe the failure characteristics of systems by specifying a nonparametric form for cumulative intensity function and by taking into account effect of covariates by a parametric form. Use of a gamma process prior for the cumulative intensity function co...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) models have been used in formulating the Malmquist index to measure productivity change over time periods. In this article, we question the validity of this index in the presence of input/output slacks that appear in DEA models used. We demonstrate with an application to banking that Malmquist index loses its meaning whenever slacks are present. As a corrective m...

This paper investigates the performance of three types of random coefficients logistic regression models; that is, models using parametric, semi-parametric, and nonparametric specifications of the distribution of the random effects. Whereas earlier studies focussed on models with a single random effect, here we look at models with multidimensional random effects (intercepts and slopes). Moreove...