BACKGROUND National Health Systems managers have been subject in recent years to considerable pressure to increase concentration and allow mergers. This pressure has been justified by a belief that larger hospitals lead to lower average costs and better clinical outcomes through the exploitation of economies of scale. In this context, the opportunity to measure scale efficiency is crucial to ad...

We consider a general online network design problem in which sequence of N requests arrive over time, each needs to use some subset the available resources E. The cost incurred by resource [Formula: see text] is function f e total load on that resource. objective minimize text]. focus functions exhibit (dis)economies scale. These are form if x > 0 (and zero = 0), exponent Optimization proble...

A structural contingency theory of IS/IT functional structure is presented which relates IS/IT functional structure to IS/IT performance contingent both on the types of economy the organization expects from the IS/IT function and the volatility of the competitive environment. Three types of economies are articulated which impact the appropriateness of the IS/IT functional structure profile: eco...

Scale effects in per capita production are an outcome of many theoretical economic models like second generation growth models, models of the new trade theory or the new economic geography. The prediction is that larger economies should have a higher per capita production than smaller economies. However, in an open economy context the scale of the economy is less important because countries can...