This paper analyses the importance of productive specialisation in explaining cost efficiency differences between banking companies. Taking as reference the Spanish banking sector during the period 1985-96, the study shows that if cost efficiency measurements are corrected for the effect of different specialisation by the estimation of separate frontiers for four different groups of competitors...

This work focuses on cost reduction methods for forest species recognition systems. Current state-of-the-art shows that the accuracy of these systems have increased considerably in the past years, but the cost in time to perform the recognition of input samples has also increased proportionally. For this reason, in this work we focus on investigating methods for cost reduction locally (at eithe...

The authors present an analysis of the choice of sample sizes for demonstrating cost-effectiveness of a new treatment or procedure, when data on both cost and efficacy will be collected in a clinical trial. The Bayesian approach to statistics is employed, as well as a novel Bayesian criterion that provides insight into the sample size problem and offers a very flexible formulation.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the cost-effectiveness of a comprehensive programme for drug-resistant tuberculosis launched in four sites in China in 2011. METHODS In 2011-2012, we reviewed the records of 172 patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis who enrolled in the comprehensive programme and we collected relevant administrative data from hospitals and China's public health agency. For compari...

BACKGROUND A number of different measures can be used within cost-utility analyses, we compared results according to both the EQ-5D and SF-6D. METHODS A randomized trial was conducted to compare 4 options for people with knee pain. Over the 2 year trial period, the change in cost to health-service was estimated, and both the EQ-5D and SF-6D were used to estimate the change in quality-adjusted...

To aid priority setting in prevention, the Assessing Cost-Effectiveness in Prevention Project (ACE-Prevention) applies standardised evaluation methods to assess the cost-effectiveness of 100 to 150 preventive interventions, taking predominantly a health sector perspective. This information is intended to help decision makers move resources from less efficient current practices to more efficient...

This paper is concerned with the problem of controlling a truncated general immigration process, which represents a population of harmful individuals, by the introduction of a predator. If the parameters of the model satisfy some mild conditions, the existence of a control-limit policy that is average-cost optimal is proved. The proof is based on the uniformization technique and on the variatio...

BACKGROUND New evidence on the clinical effectiveness of acupuncture plus usual care (acupuncture) and counselling plus usual care (counselling) for patients with depression suggests the need to investigate the health-related quality of life and costs of these treatments to understand whether they should be considered a good use of limited health resources. METHODS AND FINDINGS The cost-effec...

With increasing expenses for future HPC centers, the need to look at their productivity, defined as amount of science per total cost of ownership (TCO), grows. This includes development costs which arise from development effort spent to parallelize, tune or port an application to a certain architecture. Development effort estimation is popular in software engineering, but cannot be applied dire...

BACKGROUND Heart failure disease management programs can influence medical resource use and quality-adjusted survival. Because projecting long-term costs and survival is challenging, a consistent and valid approach to extrapolating short-term outcomes would be valuable. METHODS We developed the Tools for Economic Analysis of Patient Management Interventions in Heart Failure Cost-Effectiveness...