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...

This research identifies returns to scale (RTS) of efficient decision making units (DMUs) with desirable (good) and undesirable (bad) inputs and outputs by presenting a new DEA (data envelopment analysis) approach. In this study, we first introduce a new input-output oriented model to determine efficient DMUs in the presence of undesirable factors and then, returns to scale of these DMUs are es...

Nowadays, the assessment of environmental performance has received considerable attention by environmental strategy advocators and decision makers. In recent years, increased emission of CO2 into the air, water pollution, and global warming are universal problems all over the world. Therefore, development of firms with less CO2 emission is an important issue of attention in every area of produc...

awardness about structure of production technology and its characteristics is a usefull tool for planning in agricultural sector. in this regard, this study aims to determine some effective parameters of structure of production technology in rain fed barley production. before estimating these parameters, we examine the aggregation consistency condition for barley fields using the mean scaling t...

Using a sample of 21 OECD-countries we measure productivity in top-edge economic research by using data envelopment analysis (DEA). DEA is a tool for evaluating relative efficiency and is widely used when there are multiple inputs and outputs and one lacks a specific functional form of a production function. The publications in 10 economics journals with the highest average impact factor over t...

In this paper, we model the community question answering (CQA) websites on Stack Exchange platform as knowledge markets, and analyze how and why these markets can fail at scale. Analyzing CQA websites as markets allows site operators to reason about the failures in knowledge markets, and design policies to prevent these failures. Our main contribution is to provide insight on knowledge market f...

In this paper we study a dynamic contracting problem of optimal risk-sharing between a principal and an agent who invest in a common constant-returns-to-scale risky venture. Investment flow-returns follow a geometric Brownian motion and the two agents’ risk-preferences are represented by additively separable utility functions exhibiting constant relative risk-aversion (CRRA). Principal and agen...

Our paper reports on the use of data envelopment analysis (DEA) for the assessment of performance of secondary schools in Malaysia during the implementation of the policy of teaching and learning mathematics and science subjects in the English language (PPSMI). The novelty of our application is that it makes use of the hybrid returns-to-scale (HRS) DEA model. This combines the assumption of con...