In this paper we analyze the effects of some distortions induced by prospective payment system, i.e. Upcoding, Cream Skimming and Readmissions, on hospitals’ technical efficiency. We estimate a production function using a population–based dataset composed by all active hospitals in an Italian region during the period 1998–2007. We show that cream skimming and upcoding have a negative impact on ...

Consolidation in the global banking industry has resulted in the emergence of financial conglomerates that conduct an extensive range of businesses with a group structure. To date, however, few studies have investigated the performance features of such groups. This study aims to extend the literature by evaluating the cost characteristics (scale, scope and x-efficiency), profit efficiency and p...

This research presents a new application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to empirically determine prices of multiple products. The DEA technique is now widely applied to performance analysis and efficiency measurement in economics, business and other areas in social science. This study does not explore such conventional DEA uses, rather directing towards a new DEA application to the determin...

In this paper, the numerical technique based on hybrid Bernoulli and Block-Pulse functions has been developed to approximate the solution of system of linear Volterra integral equations. System of Volterra integral equations arose in many physical problems such as elastodynamic, quasi-static visco-elasticity and magneto-electro-elastic dynamic problems. These functions are formed by the hybridi...

Network virtualization can offer more flexibility and better manageability for the future Internet by allowing multiple heterogeneous virtual networks (VN) to coexist on a shared infrastructure provider (InP) network. A major challenge in this respect is the VN embedding problem that deals with the efficient mapping of virtual resources on InP network resources. Previous research focused on heu...

during the past few years, modeling in agriculture has attracted considerable attention. new modeling methods including neural networks are employed in various industries, and it is necessary that their use in agriculture be also considered. this research addressed the trend of energy use in broiler farms in alborz province and sought to model the trend of energy consumption and production in t...

This paper presents an efficient optimization procedure to find the optimal shapes of double curvature  arch  dams  considering  fluid–structure  interaction  subject  to  earthquake  loading. The optimization is carried out using a combination of the magnetic charged system search, big bang-big crunch algorithm and artificial neural network methods. Performing the finite element  analysis  dur...

Energy efficiency is one of leading design principles for the current deployment of cellular mobile networks. A first driving reason for this is that half of the operating costs for the network providers comes from the energy spent to power the network, with almost 80% of it being consumed at the base stations. A second reason is related to the high environmental pollution, which makes the gree...

This study aimed to evaluate the efficiency of energy consumption and economic analysis of different watermelon cultivation systems in Fars Province of Iran. Watermelon production systems were classified into five systems, namely, custom tillage (group 1), conservation tillage (group 2), traditional planting (group3), semi mechanized planting (group 4), and mechanized planting (group 5). Data w...