Growing social concerns over the environmental externalities associated with business activities are pushing firms to identify activities that create economic value with less environmental impact and to become more eco-efficient. Over the past two decades, researchers have increasingly used frontier efficiency models to evaluate productive efficiency in the presence of undesirable outputs, such...

The paper develops tools for reconciling diverse measures which characterize the ®nancial performance of the Fortune 500 companies. The technology of data envelopment analysis (DEA) is employed to determine a multi-factor ®nancial performance model which inherently recognizes tradeo€s among various ®nancial measures. This study o€ers an alternative perspective and characterization on the perfor...

This article investigates the prerequisites for a global exploration strategy in an unknown environment on a virtual disaster site. Assume that a robot equipped with a laser range scanner can build a detailed map of a previous unknown environment. The remaining question is how to use this information on this map for further exploration. On a map several interesting locations can be present wher...

Stochastic nonparametric envelopment of data (StoNED) combines the virtues of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) into a unified framework of frontier estimation. StoNED melds the nonparametric piece-wise linear DEA-type frontier with stochastic SFA-type inefficiency and noise terms. We show that the StoNED model can be estimated in the panel data setting in a...

We construct a model where the equilibrium organization of firms changes as an economy approaches the world technology frontier. In vertically integrated firms, owners (managers) have to spend time both on production and innovation activities, and this creates managerial overload, and discourages innovation. Outsourcing of some production activities mitigates the managerial overload, but create...

Although agenda of Water supply in sufficient quantity and standard quality is highlighted in India from last few years. But Yet Performance assessment and Efficiency evaluation of water supply services not in practice. However the analysis is confined to the realm of researchers and policy makers. The present paper spells inclusion of quality parameter in assessment of utilities through fronti...

In panel stochastic frontier models, the Fixed Effects (FE) approach produces biased technical efficiency scores when time-invariant variables are important in the production process, and the Random Effects (RE) approach imposes distributional assumptions about the inefficiency. Moreover, technical efficiency scores obtained from these models are biased when the sample contains a large number o...

Yoshinari Yasuda, Yoichi Miyamoto, Tomoko Yamashiro, Munehiro Asally, Ayumi Masui, Chin Wong, Kate L Loveland and Yoshihiro Yoneda* Department of Frontier Biosciences, Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, School of Biomedical Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia, Department of Anatomy and ...

This paper investigates the total factor productivity (TFP) performance of NWFP agriculture crop subsector from 1970 to 2004. It identifies the sources of growth of TFP growth and assesses TFP growth changes in agriculture crop sub-sector. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach is used to estimate the changes in the production frontier. The Malmquist productivity index has decomposed total fa...

Many real-world control applications, from economics to robotics, are characterized by the presence of multiple conflicting objectives. In these problems, the standard concept of optimality is replaced by Pareto–optimality and the goal is to find the Pareto frontier, a set of solutions representing different compromises among the objectives. Despite recent advances in multi–objective optimizati...