This paper attempts to analyse whether banking technology and environmental conditions act as barriers for the entry of foreign banks in each European banking industry. We evaluate how the efficiency score of a representative commercial bank of a given European country changes if it decides to...

In this paper we consider staffing decisions in branches of a large Canadian bank. The bank has well-developed staffing models and the branches work in a highly competitive environment. One would therefore expect limited ‘inefficiency’ in the sense of wasted resources and over-staffing....

In two recent papers, Lozano and Villa [Centralized resource allocation using data envelopment analysis. Journal of Productivity Analysis 2004;22:143-61. [1]] and Lozano et al. [Centralized target setting for regional recycling operations using DEA. OMEGA 2004;32:101-10. [2]] introduce the concept of...

Because of the piecewise linear nature of the frontier in data envelopment analysis (DEA), estimated marginal rates of substitution are only valid for infinitesimal, or small finite, changes in one or more variables. Analysing the impacts of very small changes is not adequate for many...