Background & Aims: Hospitals as the largest and most costly operational units in health care system have special importance. The rate of their efficiency can be used as a criterion for the measurement of performance and productivity of resource consumption in hospitals. The purpose of this study was to determine the technical efficiency of general hospitals of Kerman University of Medical Scien...

In this paper, we aim to model the vertical relation between retailers and suppliers in the food industry whereby retailers exercise seller power in their relation with consumers and buyer power in their relation with producers. We then evaluate the degree of price transmission, relative to the perfectly competitive benchmark, from the farm to the retail sector assuming a supply shock. With the...

This paper extends two directional distance function models, the Multi-directional Efficiency Analysis (MEA) Model and the Range Directional Model (RDM), in order to account for any type of technical inefficiency, i.e. both directional and non-directional inefficiencies. We first focus on the variable returns to scale (VRS) case, because both VRS-MEA and RDM are translation invariant models, wh...

The supply and demand of credit are not always well aligned and matched, as is reflected in the countercyclical excess reserve-to-deposit ratio and interest spread between the lending rate and the deposit rate. We develop a search-based theory of credit allocation to explain the cyclical fluctuations in bank reserves, the interest spread, as well as credit rationing. We show that search frictio...

This study measures the performance of participating nations at the Olympics, considering the quest for medals as a two-stage Olympic process. The first stage is characterized as athlete preparation (AP) and the second stage as athlete competition (AC). We extend the relational model from the constant returns to scale framework to the variable returns to scale version. The efficiency of each pa...

A supply chain is a set of suppliers, manufactures and distributors, which are linked together. The first chain is a supplier and the last one is customers. What is the most important in supply chain are highquality products by the least cost and the most benefit. In this regard, each input and output and intermediate have unit price and unit cost information. The cost-minimization and the prof...