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The study focuses on analyzing economic efficiency, technical efficiency (TE), allocative efficiency (AE) and profit (CE) in household lotus root cultivation in Soc Trang province, Vietnam. Along with that, Stata software is applied to estimate production efficiency. Research results show that lotus growing households have an average yield of 8.29 tons/ha; average profit reached 49,357,143 VND/ha; the average revenue/cost ratio is 174%; profit/cost ratio is 73% and profit/sales ratio is 42%. This is a quite encouraging result, showing that compared to other crops, lotus root has higher economic efficiency. In addition, the article also analyzes the limitations and causes of the limitations affecting the production efficiency of lotus growers in the province such as the ineffective use of fertilizers and pesticides, causing waste of time. fee. Farmers have not been trained in technical processes, so they have not applied technical learning to production to increase productivity and reduce costs. Harvesting is still quite manual, which is labor intensive and reduces the quality of tubers after harvest. From there, provide solutions as well as recommendations to local authorities and lotus growing households to increase productivity and reduce costs in order to improve the efficiency of lotus root production of lotus growers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is an agricultural corporation more efficient than a traditional family farm? This paper attempts to answer this question by examining the technical and allocative efficiency of family farms and agricultural corporations. To do so, it applies the stochastic production frontier method in panel data built on the family farms and agricultural corporations in the Japanese rice sector and focuses on comparing the technical and allocative efficiency of the two production forms at the same scale of operation. Results reveal that family farms have a significant advantage over agricultural corporations in technical efficiency at each level of scale of operation. In both production forms, as the scale of operation increases, the technical efficiency correspondingly rises. However, the disparity in technical efficiency diminishes between the two production forms as their land size increases. In contrast, the allocative efficiency of different factors differs between family farms and agricultural corporations at different scales of land size. Overall, family farms show superiority in the allocative efficiency of labour, and agricultural corporations exhibit superiority in the allocative efficiency of agricultural capital. Last, decomposition of total productivity progress (TFP) reveals that family farms have positive TFP change which is mainly attributable to a positive and large allocative component, while agricultural corporations undergo negative TFP change due to its negative and large allocative component. Moreover, the results intimate that technical progress and technical efficiency improvement are faster in agricultural corporations than in family farms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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With cognizance to some differences among the ports and complexities in productivity measurement, the research tries to identify and evaluate productive issues in terms of technical efficiencies (managerial efficiency) and scale efficiencies (managerial and allocative efficiency) experienced at individual Nigeria ports. It equally provided a technical benchmark for assessing the overall efficiencies of the respective ports in Nigeria during the pre-concessioned and post-concessioned era. The level of inputs required for each DMU to be efficient is given i.e. for DMU 2014 to be efficient input-wise, the number of berth may be reduced by two units as a result of idleness of this two (2) berths, the average turnaround time may be reduced by 3 hours and the berth occupancy may be reduced by 3%. Since a fixed asset such as berth cannot be reduced therefore technically and complimentarily the turnaround time and berth occupancy rate need to be decreased more than 5hours and 3% respectively by allocating the queue ship at the over-utilized berth to the idle berths which in turn will mitigate underutilization of this berths been required to be reduced or alternatively the port should embrace more cargo handling technology to enhance fast loading and discharging of cargoes thus attracting more vessels to the Port. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on recent work in market design to evaluate the conditions under which a market for ideas or technology (MfTs) will emerge and operate efficiently. As highlighted by Roth (2007), effective market design must ensure three basic principles: market thickness, lack of congestion, and market safety. Roth also highlights the importance of dealing with “repugnance.” Our analysis identifies the factors that are, in most circumstances, likely to inhibit the allocative efficiency of MfT. We show that key institutional developments such as the development of formalized IP exchanges suggest that effective market design may be possible for some innovation markets. Finally, our analysis suggests that markets for ideas are beset by the “repugnance” problem: from the perspective of market design, Open Science is an institution that places normative value on “free” disclosure and so undermines the ability of ideas producers to earn market-based returns for producing even very valuable “pure” knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reports on the benefits, drawbacks and processes involved for companies that out license their proprietary technology. The catalyst for this out licensing trend by firms in many industries is explored and analyzed. Industry wide research from 135 firms includes previous corporate strategies and the need for drivers of technology licensing. Technology licensing involves the transfer of technological knowledge to another organization, which sometimes results in profit loss, but positive effects result as well.

In recent years, remanufacturing has emerged in various industrial sectors, and it adds an additional production alternative apart from the conventional manufacturing process. With remanufacturing, a used return product is often disassembled, reprocessed, and then reassembled into a new product. The remanufactured product is often of the same quality as those from regular manufacturing. Even though remanufacturing saves a substantial cost of materials, it often requires more labour and other inputs. Thus, it becomes important to examine the expanded production opportunity of the system. In this paper, we therefore make a first attempt to model such a system with respect to its optimal production. This model is based on the Cobb–Douglas (Wicksell) production function. More specifically, we focus on how labour costs, material costs, and the budget influence optimal production decisions. Explicit properties of the optimal plan are derived and presented as theorems. Results of this study are intended to provide a guideline for managers to make sound decisions, when dealing with the increasingly important remanufacturing systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a simple framework that allows us to examine the cross‐country exporter productivity gap without accessing confidential firm‐level data. This gap depends on the three readily available statistics: the productivity gap between two countries; the export participation rates; and export premia. This gap holds irrespective of the distribution underlying firm productivity and irrespective of the presence of fixed costs. Under specific conditions, allocative efficiency may affect the exporter productivity gap. The empirical analysis globally validates this exercise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has found that subjective well‐being (SWB) is lower for individuals classified as being in poverty. We extend the poverty‐SWB literature by focusing on aggregate poverty. Using panel data for 39,239 individuals living in Germany from 2005–2013, we show that people's SWB is negatively correlated with the regional (state‐level) poverty ratio while controlling for individual poverty status and poverty intensity. This suggests that poverty is a public bad. The negative relationship between aggregate poverty and SWB is more salient in the upper segments of the income distribution and is robust to controlling for the rate of unemployment and per capita GDP. The character of poverty as a public bad suggests that poverty alleviation is a matter not only of distributive justice, but of allocative efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to investigate the impact of competition on determinants of allocative, scope and cost efficiencies of Indian scheduled commercial banks (SCBs). Specifically, the study, analyzes the impact of the second round of licensing on the efficiency of Indian SCBs. This is the first paper to measure scope efficiency of Indian banks and analyze its determinants. A two-stage analysis is performed on a balanced panel dataset of Indian SCBs for the period 1999-2016. In the first stage, the allocative, cost and scope efficiencies for each bank are estimated following the data envelopment analysis approach. In the second stage, internal determinants of the stated efficiency measures are estimated following the system of the generalized method of moments approach. The findings suggest that competition has not resulted in enhancing the efficiency of Indian SCBs. Among factors that can influence efficiency, it is seen that size does matter. Larger banks can enhance the efficiency of SCBs. It is also seen that having more foreign banks improves the overall efficiency of SCBs. However, before embarking on further rounds of licensing, the study posits that market-driven correction to succeed, it is imperative to address sunspots in the form of investor or borrower repression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the most popular measures of technical efficiency, Farrell measures have not been incorporated explicitly in the decomposition of profit efficiency. By synthesizing existing measures of profit efficiency, the paper "A Unifying Framework for Farrell Profit Efficiency Measurement" establishes a general oriented model that includes many existing profit efficiency measures as special cases. Furthermore, the oriented measures generated from this model have consistent meaningful interpretation. This is also perhaps the first time in the literature that the Farrell technical efficiency and allocative efficiency are included as multiplicative components of profit efficiency. A new component is introduced to help decision makers distinguish input changes from output changes in improving profit efficiency. Measuring profit efficiency is a challenging task, and many different approaches have been suggested. This paper synthesizes existing approaches and develops a general Farrell-type approach of the profit efficiency measurement. Our derivations unveil new and useful relationships between existing measures and the proposed new Farrell-type measures. In addition, this helps us establish a generalized and unifying framework for studying efficiency behavior of firms, where the profit efficiency measure satisfies desirable properties and contains the conventional Farrell measures of technical efficiency and allocative efficiency as multiplicative components. A new component of the decomposition of profit efficiency, which we call the revenue-efficient allocative efficiency measure, is introduced to identify the necessary changes of input scale and input mix in addition to output changes. The proposed new approach also encompasses and is coherent with profit-maximizing behavior as a benchmark case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study introduces a novel way of calculating and analyzing cost metafrontier Malmquist productivity index model (CMMPI) under variable return to scale measurement. The CMMPI which reflects operational performance more comprehensively and determine ways of enhancing future competiveness, not only estimates efficiency change but also decomposes gap ratio thus enabling the decision making unit to differentiate group frontier from metafrontier within the broad definition of “catch-up.” Empirical results show that the CMMPI of international tourism hotels in Taiwan declined by 0.9% from 2002 to 2010 mainly because of the deterioration of meta-technical efficiency change, meta-allocative efficiency change, meta-cost scale efficiency change, and the meta-input price effect change. Empirical results suggest that the completeness of cost approach is useful for exploring the characteristics of the Taiwanese international tourism hotel industry. Moreover, the international chain hotel is significantly superior to independent hotels in meta-cost efficiency, meta-technical efficiency, and meta-allocative efficiency, and several managerial insights and implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stated objective of antitrust policy is to prevent the consolidation of monopolistic positions and the resulting output restrictions and accrual of monopoly rents. Two separate issues of empirical importance arise when evaluation of public policy is attempted. The first is the ability of the government to locate the relevant cases. The second is the effectiveness of policy in curbing anticompetitive practices successfully. Professor Ellert directs his attention to public policy related to mergers. His principal tool of analysis is the accumulation of rate of return residuals. On the whole, his work merits congratulation for sound methodology and meticulously marshalled evidence. The ability of the government to locate cases of monopolistic transgressions is an issue which requires us to observe the experience of indicted firms in the prelitigation interval. Since the government's decision to indict is presumably based on critical information about monopolistic behavior, an efficient market must have embodied that same information in the valuation of the relevant securities. Ellert's basic finding is that for litigated cases, there is significant and positive accumulation of residuals in the 100 months prior to the month of indictment. I will have to agree with Ellert's careful statement that the source of positive residuals is ambiguous. It must be remembered that abnormal market returns signify not superior levels of profitability but nonanticipated changes in profit prospects. Such changes may either occur because of expansion of monopolistic pricing, or as a result of improvements in operating efficiency. This dilemma runs clear through most of the empirical literature of traditional industrial structure analysis. In the light of this dilemma, the positive accumulation of residuals observed in the pre-litigation period is a necessary but not sufficient indication of monopolistic expansion in the cases which the government selected for indictment. Th... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I would like to congratulate Professor Ellert on his paper. I think it is a significant and valuable contribution to economic analysis of mergers and anti-trust legislation. As with most examples of good empirical research, the paper not only clarifies the validity of some a priori hypotheses, it also stimulates interest in particular lines of future research. One such line that strikes me has to do with the behavior of the anti-trust enforcement agencies. The evidence presented by Professor Ellert certainly suggests that, at least in merger cases, the agencies do impose non-negligable costs on the firms they choose to prosecute. This ability to impose costs is, of course, a prerequisite for effective enforcement of the law. Another prerequisite that is at least as important, however, is that the agencies apply their punitive power in such a way that firms whose merger activity truly violates the law face a significantly higher probability of prosecution than do firms whose activity does not violate the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on a centralized production planning system (CPPS) for multiplant manufacturing companies. CPPS assigns specific responsibilities to the sales, distribution, material, and production departments and provides two functional buffers in the information flow--organizational and physical. The production buffers of cycle stock, working stock, and anticipation stock are explained. An example is the study by Matson Research Corporation which focused on making a four-division, consumer-products organization more efficient. Characteristics of unplanned multiplant systems that result in lost capacity and high unit cost are mentioned, as well as three trends in restructuring operations, four elements in a planning system, and the key production requirements report.

The article provides empirical research to test the efficiency of the market for bank stocks. Economists Friend and Herman have separated the concept of capital market efficiency into two major ingredients. First, the market should be successful in grouping resources to the highest-valued use. Second, a capital market should be operationally successful pertaining to minimizing transactions costs. The market for bank stocks will be tested for allocative and operational efficiency by comparing it to other markets.

There is no letup in attempts to measure the effectiveness of advertising. But what about attempts to measure the effects of industrial product publicity? The authors of this article assess this important question, and describe an approach to publicity measurement which offers quantitative data for comparison purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the difficulty company managers have in selecting which magazines to place advertisements. According to the author, magazines present favorable and self-serving data on their circulation and readership to influence advertisers. A uniform approach to readership data, the Standard Industrial Classification (S.I.C.) system, is described as a cost effective and standardized method which will benefit advertisers. The S.I.C. is thoroughly explained and is noted for measuring the industrial plants which receive certain industry specific publications. The primary purpose of the S.I.C. is to assist management in improving cost effectiveness of advertising.

This article critically examines the prevalent economic conceptions of educational productivity. It distinguishes between an approach aiming at enhancing allocative efficiency and one aiming to better use each available resource (technical efficiency). The article then examines the intellectual foundations of these two approaches, investigates how they stand in relation to each other, and points to their limitations from an educational perspective. It is argued that the two approaches are ill suited for the educational domain. The article concludes by suggesting an approach for increasing educational productivity based on reaching predetermined production objectives rather than attempting to maximise it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical evidence suggests that exporter firms tend to charge higher markups than non-exporters due to trade barriers. The exporters’ markup premium, however, may disappear in a special case, namely when the home country is small relative to its trade partners and trade barriers are low. This can be because competition is more intense in the large export destination than in the small home country, so that firms are able to set higher markups for locally sold products but not for exports. This paper provides empirical evidence on the validity of this special case by estimating markups for firms in Luxembourg who generally export to larger countries. The estimated negative markup premium for exporters has important implications for the productivity measurement. In a sufficiently small open economy, exporters’ productivity may be biased downward, when the firm-level markup variation is not controlled for in the productivity estimation. The bias in the productivity estimates further leads to the inaccurate conclusion that openness to international trade lowers allocative efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assesses the allocative efficiency of quoted insurance companies in Nigeria. Specifically, it determines the extent to which quoted insurance companies in Nigeria are efficient in terms of their resource allocation and utilization. In pursuance of the above, the study employs the input-oriented data-envelopment analysis (DEA) model with four input and output variables. The input variables are management expenses, netpremium, shareholders'fund and total assets, while the output variables are investment income, net claims, profit after tax and market share. These variables were analyzed, using the multi-stage input-oriented DEAP version 2.1, with a variable return-to-scale assumption. The result reveals high slacks for management expenses, net profit, shareholders' fund and total assets in twenty-three companies and this shows the degree of inefficient allocation of resources in the Nigerian quoted insurance companies. On the other hand, the output fall (slack) mean of investment income, net claims, profit after tax and market share in twenty-three companies indicate what the companies would have achieved, if the input variables had been properly allocated. We, therefore, recommend that the utilization of total assets and shareholders' fund be improved upon because they recorded the highest input slack score. This should be done by formulating policy and guidelines for the effective use of total assets and shareholders' fund by stakeholders in the insurance sector. Quoted firms in the insurance sector should engage in activities that encourage large insurance patronage and this will, no doubt, result in high market share and profit after tax, since they recorded the highest output slacks. We also recommend that insurance standards and information banks be created for the availability and use of resource inputs at all stages of insurance operations in Nigeria. This is necessary to determine those inputs that are not contributing maximally, in a bid to reduce the expenses and costs associated with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze and evaluate cost efficiency (CE) scores of Indian Scheduled Commercial Banks (SCBs) in India over a period of 22 years, i.e. 1991–1992 to 2012–2013.Design/methodology/approach Data envelopment analysis (DEA) – a non-parametric approach is used to calculate efficiency scores of banks. Further the efficiency scores are decomposed into technical and allocative efficiency. The differences in the efficiency scores across ownership as well as across reformatory and post-reformatory era are examined by applying Panel Tobit Regression.Findings The paper also identifies the reason for cost inefficiency among Indian banks. In addition, the nature of their return to scale of all SCBs has also been evaluated. The results of the paper depict that Indian SCBs have never achieved full CE score of 1 in any of the years of study. The dominant reason identified behind cost inefficiency is allocative inefficiency. Surprisingly, the results also highlight that SCBs exhibit higher CE scores in reformatory era as compared to the post-reformatory era.Originality/value With specific reference to India, even lesser literature is found on CE. Indian banking sector has witnessed many changes on account of liberalization, privatization and globalization (LPG). Before banks adapted to the new environment, the global financial crisis acted as a fuel to fire affecting the performance of banks. Thus, a reassessment over a longer period would help to know a wholistic view of the issue of cost inefficiency, which has always been a troubling factor for Indian banks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late 2000s' economic recession is considered the longest economic downturn since the 1930s Great Depression. Declining real estate values ignited an increase in loan defaults and mortgage foreclosures that led to a surge of bank failures at a rate not experienced by the U.S. banking industry since the 1980s. A total of 509 bank failures were recorded by the FDIC from January 2007-December 2014, with nearly 60% of these failures occurring in 2009 and 2010. In contrast, there were only 24 bank failures in the U.S. during the 7-year period prior to 2007. This study analyzed certain components of operating decisionsmade by banks that either survived or became critically insolvent during the late 2000s financial crisis using an Input Distance Stochastic Frontier function to estimate the technical efficiency (TE) and allocative efficiency (AE) between agricultural banks and non-agricultural banks. This efficiency analysis was applied to a 7-year pre-recession period and is designed to final out any early warning signals that decrease the efficiency level of banks. Results suggest that survival banks were more technically efficient than critically insolvent banks, and banks' tendency to utilize cheaper inputs were more likely to stand the economic crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aims at improving our understanding of the individual contribution of the components of total factor productivity (TFP) change to U.S. agricultural productivity. A novel sequential primal-dual estimation routine to calculate TFP change is proposed, using a multi-output input distance function in the first stage, followed by a cost minimization routine in the second stage. TFP change is estimated as the direct sum of the estimates of technical change, technical efficiency change, allocative efficiency change, input price effects, changes in output markup, and changes in returns to scale in each state. The validity of the proposed methodology is supported by the remarkable overlap and high correlation of our annual estimates of TFP change with the USDA’s measures of change in TFP by state. Although technical change tends to be the largest contributor to productivity change, it bears a low and statistically insignificant correlation with TFP change on an annual basis, whereas annual changes in the markup effect and returns to scale are highly and significantly correlated with TFP changes. This is the first study to find a slowdown of technical progress in the U.S. farm sector in the 1990s and 2000s, and technical regress during the farm crisis of the 1980s. While technical efficiency shows a positive overall trend, allocative efficiency shows a negative overall trend, and their combined effect (i.e., the overall cost efficiency) slows down TFP growth. The policy recommendations from previous studies on the drivers of TFP should be revised in light of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More information in a market presumably leads to a higher allocative efficiency. In this paper, we study the relationship between the allocative efficiency of a market and the quantity of information about the realisation of the network structure that is available to its participants. We confine our study to thin buyer-seller markets with a few traders who can only trade together if they are linked. We assume that these links are independently formed with the same probability p, assembling a random bipartite graph à la Erdős-Rényi, and that traders behave strategically using linear markup strategies. Under these conditions we derive the equilibrium strategies, for complete and incomplete information about traders’ valuations. We demonstrate that the quantity of information that is available about the network structure has a non-monotonic effect on efficiency. Moreover, the shape of this non-monotonicity flips when we switch from complete to incomplete information about traders’ valuations. Under complete information about valuations it is recommended that traders receive either all the information about the network or nothing, and under incomplete information solely information about the existence of the own trading partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With rapid economic development, energy consumption and environmental pollution have become increasingly prominent, making clear emission reduction targets necessary. Therefore, this paper forecasts input and output variables for China's six industries during the 13th Five-Year Plan by using an EBMDEA model to analyze the distribution efficiency of the industries. Moreover, the ZSG-DEA model is used to optimize carbon emission quotas and establish a reasonable distribution plan. The results show that among the six major sectors in China, the initial allocation of carbon emission rights has relatively low DEA efficiency, with significant efficiency differences among sectors. Only agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, and fisheries achieved an efficient initial allocation of carbon emission rights, whereas industry and transportation, warehousing, and the postal service exhibited low allocative efficiency. The industrial sector has the greatest room for adjustment and its reduction can be compensated for through an increase in emissions from the other sectors so as to keep total carbon emissions constant. Based on the conclusions of the study, we make suggestions for various stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on Cultural Economics provides us with some examples for the measurement of technical efficiency. However, there are few case studies dedicated to the analysis of allocative efficiency. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap by incorporating a methodology that analyses both technical and allocative efficiency. We use the Shephard's distance function, particularly suitable when affronted with non-profit-making firms or institutions that are not interested in cost minimization. As an empirical application, we analyse the efficiency of Fundación Princesa de Asturias ( PAF), a Spanish non-governmental organization devoted to promoting the cultural, scientific and humanistic values of universal heritage, the period of study being 1988-2012. Our findings suggest that PAF could have used 7% less inputs to achieve the same level of output. On the other hand, we have found allocative inefficiency. Concretely, the input for other expenditures appears to have been over-utilized in relation to both the inputs for labour and current assets, with labour in turn being over-utilized in relation to current assets. Moreover, our results indicate that both technical and allocative efficiency have clearly improved during the period analysed. In summary, our empirical application shows how distance function methodology can be successfully implemented to measure allocative efficiency in cultural firms and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: In 2014, city leaders from around the world endorsed the Paris Declaration on Fast-Track Cities, pledging to achieve the 2020 and 2030 HIV targets championed by UNAIDS. The City of Johannesburg - one of South Africa's metropolitan municipalities and also a health district - has over 600,000 people living with HIV (PLHIV), more than any other city worldwide. We estimate what it would take in terms of programmatic targets and costs for the City of Johannesburg to meet the Fast-Track targets, and demonstrate the impact that this would have. Methods: We applied the Optima HIV epidemic and resource allocation model to demographic, epidemiological and behavioural data on 26 sub-populations in Johannesburg. We used data on programme costs and coverage to produce baseline projections. We calculated how many people must be diagnosed, put onto treatment and maintained with viral suppression to achieve the 2020 and 2030 targets. We also estimated how treatment needs - and therefore fiscal commitments - could be reduced if the treatment targets are combined with primary HIV prevention interventions (voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC), an expanded condom programme, and comprehensive packages for female sex workers (FSW) and young females). Results: If current programmatic coverage were maintained, Johannesburg could expect 303,000 new infections and 96,000 AIDS-related deaths between 2017 and 2030 and 769,000 PLHIV by 2030. Achieving the Fast-Track targets would require an additional 135,000 diagnoses and 232,000 people on treatment by 2020 (an increase in around 80% over 2016 treatment numbers), but would avert 176,000 infections and 56,500 deaths by 2030. Assuming stable ART unit costs, this would require ZAR 29 billion (USD 2.15 billion) in cumulative treatment investments over the 14 years to 2030. Plausible scale-ups of other proven interventions (VMMC, condom distribution and FSW strategies) could yield additional reductions in new infections (between 4 and 15%), and in overall treatment investment needs. Scaling up VMMC in line with national targets is found to be cost-effective in the medium term. Conclusions: The scale-up in testing and treatment programmes over this decade has been rapid, but these efforts must be doubled to reach 2020 targets. Strategic investments in proven interventions will help Johannesburg achieve the treatment targets and be on track to end AIDS by 2030. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1980's Kopp and Diewert proposed a popular method to decompose cost efficiency into allocative and technical efficiency for parametric functional forms based on the radial approach initiated by Farrell. We show that, relying on recently proposed homogeneity and duality results, their approach is unnecessary for self-dual homothetic production functions, while it is inconsistent in the non-homothetic case. By stressing that for homothetic technologies the radial distance function can be correctly interpreted as a technical efficiency measure, since allocative efficiency is independent of the output level and radial input reductions leave it unchanged, we contend that for non-homothetic technologies this is not the case because optimal input demands depend on the output targeted by the firm, as does the inequality between marginal rates of substitution and market prices-allocative inefficiency. We demonstrate that a correct definition of technical efficiency corresponds to the directional distance function because its flexibility ensures that allocative efficiency is kept unchanged through movements in the input production possibility set when solving technical inefficiency, and therefore the associated cost reductions can be solely-and rightly-ascribed to technical-engineering-improvements. The new methodology allowing for a consistent decomposition of cost inefficiency is illustrated resorting to simple examples of non-homothetic production functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The centralized sale of TV broadcasting rights in league sports constitutes a cartel which in many European countries is allowed only if it complies with certain conditions set by competition authorities. Two of the most important conditions are: i) partial unbundling, i.e. the rights must be unbundled into several separate packages; and ii) the no-single-buyer rule, i.e. the packages must be sold to different broadcasters. This article shows how a combinatorial auction can be employed to sell broadcasting rights allocating them endogenously based on the broadcasters' bids and, thus, without requiring the seller to pre-determine the packages of such rights. This feature can address various competition policy issues, including facilitating market entry and preventing coordination among bidders. Also, a combinatorial auction has the potential to achieve higher levels of allocative efficiency and higher revenue levels compared to auctions with pre-determined packages of broadcasting rights. • The centralized sale of TV sports rights has raised competition policy issues. • Combinatorial auctions (CAs) allocate TV rights endogenously based on bids made. • Such feature can potentially prevent coordination among bidders. • CAs allow bidders to express complementarities and eliminate aggregation risks. • CAs can potentially improve allocative efficiency and achieve higher revenue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an enhanced Dominance Network (DN) to assess the technical, economic and allocative efficiency of a set of Decision Making Units (DMUs). In a DN, the nodes represent DMUs and the arcs correspond to dominance relationships between them. Two types of dominance relationship are considered: technical and economic. The length of a technical dominance arc between two nodes is a weighted measure of the input and output differences between the two DMUs. The length of an economic dominance arc between two nodes corresponds to the cost, revenue or profit difference between them (depending on whether only unit input prices, unit output prices or both are known). The proposed dominance network is a multiplex network with two relations; the structure of both relations is similar. Thus, both of them are layered and their arcs have transitivity and additivity properties. However, since technical dominance implies economic dominance but not the reverse, economic dominance is more common and has a deeper structure. It may also have an underlying potential field so that the length of the arcs between any two nodes depends on the difference in their potentials and the direction of the arcs depends on the sign of that difference. Allocative inefficiencies can also be gauged on this DN. Complex network measures can be used to characterize and study this type of DN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'Dynamic-network' version of cost efficiency measurement in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is proposed in this paper. The classical DEA models ignore operations of individual processes within a system; moreover, they compute efficiency at the same time. Therefore, we suggest a relational model to estimate cost efficiency in static network structures. Also, we incorporate the dynamic effect in network structures. The proposed models here evaluate the overall efficiency over the whole periods and indicate it as a weighted average of period efficiencies. The main advantage revealed in this study is recognition of: which divisions at what periods caused the inefficiency of the system, the internal activities of the system over time, considered; moreover, the results obtained here is applicable in, improving the performance of the system. A case study of Iranian banking industry is used to show the applicability of the approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inter-municipal cooperation is gaining in popularity in many Western countries, making it a matter of pressing importance to better understand what factors might contribute to the success of such arrangements. This article focuses on three Norwegian inter-municipal cooperative arrangements in the field of child welfare that are deemed to be successful, and the aim is to identify common features across the three cases with a focus on the governance structures of the collaborations. The study combines document studies and qualitative interviews, and reveals three main factors that can explain success: a sense of urgency, political and administrative support combined with incremental processes. The study also indicates that these factors interact, and can thus not be viewed as explanations taken individually. Furthermore, the potential negative effects on allocative efficiency are highlighted. Since the success of inter-municipal cooperation seems at least partly to depend on whether the task in focus is "moved out" of the ordinary activity and embedded in a higher political and administrative level, it is argued that this may further fragment the municipalities' ability to make priorities between sectors and services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research study is carried out to examine allocative efficiency among tomato growers in Mohmand Agency, Pakistan. The study is based on primary data, collected through a well designed questionnaire from a sample of 115 tomato growers. A Cobb-Douglas type production model is used to estimate tomato yield and identify important factors affecting yield. Ordinary Least Square estimates for the model indicate that machinery, seed quantity, labor, number of irrigation, chemicals spray and fertilizers have positive significant effects on tomato yield. Allocative efficiency analysis reveals that machinery, seed quantity, number of irrigation, fertilizers and chemicals are underutilized, while labor and FYM are over utilized for tomato production in the study area. The study recommends training for growers and field labors, provision of shortterm formal credit and subsidies on seed, chemical spray, fertilizers and other underutilized inputs/ capitals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While both simultaneous and sequential contests are mechanisms used in practice such as crowdsourcing, job interviews and sports contests, few studies have directly compared their performance. By modeling contests as incomplete information all-pay auctions with linear costs, we analytically and experimentally show that the expected maximum effort is higher in simultaneous contests, in which contestants choose their effort levels independently and simultaneously, than in sequential contests, in which late entrants make their effort choices after observing all prior participants' choices. Our experimental results also show that efficiency is higher in simultaneous contests than in sequential ones. Sequential contests' efficiency drops significantly as the number of contestants increases. We also discover that when participants' ability follows a power distribution, high ability players facing multiple opponents in simultaneous contests tend to under-exert effort, compared to theoretical predictions. We explain this observation using a simple model of overconfidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore whether localization of industries can reduce economic distortions and dispersion in total factor productivity (TFP) among firms in Punjab, Pakistan's largest province economically. We consider two types of misallocation: (i) dispersion in the distribution of output-based TFP (TFPQ), in particular the survival of low productivity firms in the left tail; and (ii) dispersion in revenue-based TFP (TFPR), indicative of allocative inefficiency. The results are mixed: On the one hand, we find that the distribution of TFPQ is less dispersed in more agglomerated areas, measured by the localization quotient, local productive concentration, and average firm size. At the same time, we find that average TFPQ is also positively related to localization, especially the presence of small firms in the same sector, even though own-firm TFP is lowest for small firms. On the other hand, we do not find evidence that agglomeration improves allocative efficiency measured as deviations in TFPR from the sector average, concluding rather that greater localization of small firms is associated with firms being more output and capital constrained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the efficiency and distributive effects of three prominent accounting methods in auction settings when bidders' incentives are linked to accounting income. The purchase price method (PP) requires the acquirer to book the acquisition at historical cost, thereby underestimating the asset value by the amount of the acquirer's surplus in the transaction. The exit value method (EV) is downward biased and forces the acquirer to book an accounting loss on the date of acquisition. EV connects otherwise independent valuations inducing a reporting-based winner's curse and can even lead to fire-sale-like values. Relative to PP, EV implies lower asset prices, a decrease (increase) in the surplus of the seller (acquirer), and an increase in the probability that the asset attains its best use when the market is sufficiently competitive. Finally, I examine an alternative method in which the asset is valued at its perceived value-in-use (VU). Under this method, the acquirer bids more aggressively to increase perceived value-in-use, leading to a shift of surplus from the acquirer to the seller. Yet VU is unbiased and always maximizes the probability that the asset attains its best use. This paper was accepted by Gérard Cachon, accounting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study used the stochastic frontier model to examine the technical, allocative and economic efficiency of maize production in northern Ghana using cross-sectional data for the 2011/2012 cropping season. Conventional inputs such as farm size, seed, fertilizer, labour and weedicides were statistically significant and had positive effects on maize output in northern Ghana using the Cobb-Douglas functional form. The mean estimates were 85.1%, 87.8% and 74.7% for technical, allocative and economic efficiencies respectively. Largely, maize production in the study area exhibited increasing returns to scale. The determinants of technical inefficiency were experience, agricultural extension service and gender. Farmers with many years of experience in maize production were more technically efficient and opportunities that bring the less experienced farmers to tap the accumulated knowledge of the more experienced ones would improve maize production. Farmers who had access to agricultural extension services were more technically efficient than those who did not have access and strengthening the extension service would further enable them improve on their technical efficiency. Male farmers were more technically efficient than females in maize cultivation and efforts that stress gender equality as regards access to economic resources, information and decision-making would help narrow this gap. There is allocative inefficiency relative to all the production inputs under the prevailing prices. Land, seed and weedicides would be allocatively efficient by increasing their use by 26.6%, 10.52% and 39.9% respectively. Fertilizer and labour are currently being over-used and requires 82.8% and 94.5% reductions respectively to reach their allocatively efficient points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has many attractions as a technique for analysing the efficiency of educational organisations, such as schools and universities, care must be taken in its use whenever its assumption of convexity of the prevailing technology and associated production possibility set may not hold. In particular, if the convexity assumption does not hold, DEA may overstate the scope for improvements in technical efficiency through proportional increases in all educational outputs and understate the importance of improvements in allocative efficiency from changing the educational output mix. The paper therefore examines conditions under which the convexity assumption is not guaranteed, particularly when the performance evaluation includes measures related to the assessed quality of the educational outputs. Under such conditions, there is a need to deploy other educational efficiency assessment tools, including an alternative non-parametric output-orientated technique and a more explicit valuation function for educational outputs, in order to estimate the shape of the efficiency frontier and both technical and allocative efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The environmental economics literature has for a long time been occupied with the relationships between environmental regulations, technical efficiency, and productivity growth. This paper extends this discussion by taking up environmental regulations' implications for allocative efficiency. It establishes a model framework that allows disentangling managerial and regulatory induced allocative efficiencies, and utilizes Data Envelopment Analysis to a sample of 67 coal-to-gas substituting power plants observed from 2002 to 2008 to calculate Nerlovian profit efficiencies and their technical and allocative efficiency components. The empirical results illustrate that failing to control for environmental regulations leads to overestimation of managerial allocative efficiencies by ignoring compliance costs. Marginal abatement cost estimates that are in line with allowance prices for NO and SO are further obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study considered the cost efficiency analysis of cotton-melon cropping system under tunnels. The data were collected from 150 farmers; those were cultivating cotton-melon crops in combination under tunnels. The study area was Punjab, Pakistan. The stochastic cost frontier analysis was used to estimate the allocative efficiency of cotton-melon cropping systems efficiency. The result illustrates that none of the farmers to be optimally using their inputs. The average allocative efficiency was around 75%. Approximately 36 percent of farms allocative efficiency varies from 0.20 to 0.60. Around 60% of farms allocative efficiency ranges from 0.61 to above 0.90. The under and over-utilization of inputs such as land, seeds, fertilizers and pesticides reflect the general performance of the inputs in terms of their degree of changes in cotton-melon output to change inputs reflected by the allocative efficiency analysis. It is indispensable that policies aimed at adapting innovative farming techniques must be implemented in an efficient manner. Effectively implementation of agricultural schemes, formal education and in-formal education should be realized. During and after conducting the agricultural research, it is needed to recommend the farmers about the rate of inputs application i.e. seed, pesticide spray and NPK that are best suited to the local weather patterns and cropping systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vision of a steady-state economy elaborated by Herman Daly describes an economy that uses materials and energy within the regenerative and assimilative limits of the planet's ecosystems. Sustainable scale, just distribution, and efficient allocation are its constitutive theoretical goals. This paper is a critique of the theoretical foundations of steady-state economics. It argues that steady-state economics consists in an attempt to squeeze neoclassical economics into a biophysical and ethical corset. As a result, many fundamental flaws and criticisms of neoclassical economics remain. As a consequence, steady-state economics does not lead to a radical departure from, or improvement upon, neoclassical theory but rather to fundamental internal inconsistencies between the ‘old’ economics paradigm and ‘new’ progressive ecological economic thinking. Contradictions appear at various levels ranging from ontology and methodology to theory and values. As Daly has pioneered the foundations of ecological economics with his thinking, these ambiguities are not only problematic for steady-state economics but ecological economics as a field more generally. The paper concludes that ecological economics has to let go of neoclassical foundations as they contradict its core values and ambitions. A new and consistent theory of political economy of the environment along heterodox lines is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether the People's Republic of China's (PRC) economic slowdown since the 2008 financial crisis is a cyclical downturn or a long-run trend has important policy implications. As productivity is the determinant factor for long-term economic growth and the PRC watches soaring labor cost while no serious unemployment recently, this article tries to understand its slowdown from the supply side. Based on provincial panel data, it first identifies the determinants of productivity growth and then uses counterfactual analysis to simulate effects of the PRC's policy-induced investment boom on its economic growth. It finds that economic openness enhances productivity, whereas economies at higher stages of development on average have lower productivity growth. Second, productivity of economies accumulating more stock of inventory grows more slowly, while the opposite is observed for those with higher labor involvement rates. Third, government size and investment rate both have significantly negative effects on productivity growth. Finally, the diminishing late-mover advantage and the growth in investment rate are both major contributors to the current decline in the PRC's productivity growth. The current economic slowdown does not seem to be a cyclical downturn. Indeed, further reforms are needed to stabilize the PRC's growth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study is the first proposing allocatively efficient multi-attribute auctions for the procurement of multiple items. In the B2B e-commerce logistics problem ( ELP), the e-commerce platform is the shipper generating a large number of online orders between product sellers and buyers, and third-party logistics (3 PL) providers are carriers that can deliver these online orders. This study focuses on the ELP with multiple attributes ( ELP- MA), which is generally the problem of matching the shipper's online orders and 3 PL providers given that price and other attributes are jointly evaluated. We develop a one-sided Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (O- VCG) auction for the ELP- MA. The O- VCG auction leads to incentive compatibility (on the sell side), allocative efficiency, budget balance, and individual rationality. We next introduce the concept of universally unsatisfied set to construct a primal-dual algorithm, also called the primal-dual Vickrey ( PDV) auction. We prove that the O- VCG auction can be viewed as a single-attribute multi-unit forward Vickrey ( SA- MFV) auction. Both PDV and SA- MFV auctions realize VCG payments and truthful bidding for general valuations. This result reveals the underlying link not only between single-attribute and multi-attribute auctions, but between static and dynamic auctions in a multi-attribute setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: China's economy has experienced a high-rate growth since the reform and opening up in 1978. However, some macro-statistics indicated that China's economy grows with a low efficiency. In fact, these conclusions based on macro-statistics and the performance of the economy as a whole cannot reflect the multi-level, dynamic and, therefore, complicated situation of China. By using firm-level data, and the stochastic frontier production model, this paper makes an investigation on the changing trends of TFP of China's LMIE between 1995 and 2002, and the decomposition of factors of growth. Results: Main findings include: (1) the weighted average of the annual growth of TFP in China's large and medium sized industrial enterprises was as high as 6.8 % with a rising trend during 1996-2002; (2) the contribution to TFP growth by the factor of Frontier Technology Progress reached as much as 14 percentage points per annum on average; (3) the decline in Technical Efficiency (Relative to the Frontier) reduced the TFP growth by 7.1 percentage points per annum on average; (4) Allocative Efficiency contributed on average only 0.02 percentage points per annum to the TFP growth and Scale Dis-Economy slowed the growth of TFP by 0.33 percentage points per annum. Conclusions: The results show that at the turn of the century, the most important part of China's industry was in the middle of an industrial productivity revolution driven by both Frontier Technological Progress and the great potential of technical efficiency of lagging enterprises. The revolution is driven by increased competition, privatization, foreign investment, and business expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to a large number of rich natural gas reserves in Iran, and considering the acceptable income from the exports of oil products, the consumption of gas instead of oil products in different consuming sectors seems to be rational. Therefore, in this article, the allocation of natural gas to different sectors such as residential, industries, power plants, transportation, reinjection to oil wells, export, and so forth is estimated based on the three scenarios using a linear programming method for the year 2025 in Iran. The results indicate that if there is no planned consumption management, the allocation of gas in future years will certainly have deficiencies in some sectors in Iran. Consequently, the feasible limit for unit replacement revenue of injection to oil wells is also calculated by sensitivity analysis on the coefficients of linear programming. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]