In Book II of Plato’s Republic , Socrates discusses the cities necessity and luxury (372d–373a). Discussions these have often focused on citizens desiring more than they need, which creates a demand for luxury. Yet second part equation, is not usually recognized, that there must be sufficient supply to meet this demand. The focus article importance in discussion first two . This argues way Plat...

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...

Banks are looking for ways to close their operational performance gap. This paper proposes a new approach for the detection and analysis of process inefficiency. The Benchmarking of Transactions reveals insights concerning the performance of a business process and offers new opportunities for process improvement. The article delivers an overview of the concept as well as the results of an appli...

As a measure of overall technical inefficiency the Directional Distance Function (DDF) introduced by Chambers, Chung, and Färe ties the potential output expansion and input contraction together through a single parameter. By duality, the DDF is related to a measure of profit inefficiency, which is calculated as the normalized deviation between optimal and actual profit at market prices. As we s...

When the insurer has access to information about test status, genetic insurance can handle the negative effects of genetic testing on insurance coverage and income distribution. Hence, efficient testing is promoted. When information about prevention and test status is private, two types of social inefficiencies may occur; genetic testing may not be done when it is socially efficient and genetic...

We construct an endogenous growth model and we employ empirical analysis to investigate the link between foreign aid and production inefficiency in the presence of different political orientations in the recipient country. Using a panel of 124 countries from 1971 to 2007 and the production frontier toolbox, controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, time horizons, the sources of aid, and the tim...

The assessment of the effectiveness of e-commerce websites is of critical importance to online retailers. However, the current techniques for evaluating effectiveness are limited in that they do not allow for formal empirical measurement of the productivity and performance of the website. In this paper, we use the theoretical perspective of production economics to measure the performance of Int...