One of the chief difficulties associated with the so-called backtracking technique for combinatorial problems has been our inability to predict the efficiency of a given algorithm, or to compare the efficiencies of different approaches, without actually writing and running the programs. This paper presents a simple method which produces reasonable estimates for most applications, requiring only...

Bootstrap confidence intervals on fixed-effects efficiency estimates in micro panels exhibit low coverage probabilities. We propose an alternative efficiency measure involving the mean of the firm effects. With the same estimated efficiency ranks as the traditional measure, its corresponding bootstrap confidence intervals have better coverage probabilities. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reser...

Milking data of 34 single automatic milking system (AMS) units on 29 Galician dairy farms were analyzed to determine the system capacity in each farm under actual working conditions. Number of cows, milk yield, milkings per cow per day, actual milking time, rejected milking time, cleaning time, and machine downtime were used to determine the number of cows milked per AMS unit to obtain the opti...

In estimating equation technique for estimating the mean regression parameters, one important issue is how to choose the weights to improve the efficiency of the estimation. The key idea of this paper is to replace the weights with the empirically estimated covariances. We discuss regression of an outcome on a vector of covariates, and propose an optimal estimating equation approach which achie...

Previous experience and research indicated that the Pareto Principle (80/20 Principle) has been widely used in many industries to achieve more with less. The study described in this paper concurs that this principle can be applied to improve the estimating accuracy and efficiency, especially in design development stage of projects. In fact, establishing an effective cost estimating model to imp...

The technical efficiency involved in cocoa production in Cross River State was estimated using the stochastic frontier production function analysis. The effects of some selected socio- economic characteristics of the farmers on the efficiency indices were also estimated. The study relied upon primary data generated from interviewing cocoa farmers using a set of structured questionnaire. A multi...