Over the past decades Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has emerged as an important nonparametric method of evaluating performance of decision making units through benchmarking. Although developed primarily for measuring technical efficiency, DEA is now applied extensively for measuring scale...

In the present study we evaluate the overall cost efficiency of a network of branches of a single large public sector bank in India within the city of Calcutta using the data for the year 2012. Our objective is to determine the optimal number of branches within a postal district that could...

The extent to which Indian organized manufacturing performance changed after the Economic Reform of 1991 has been an important question among empirical analysts. Using input-output data from the Annual Survey of Industries for the period 1970-71 through 2007-08, this paper compares the pre- and...

An economic measure of scale efficiency is the ratio of the minimum average cost to the average cost at the actual output level of a firm. It is easily measured by the ratio of the total cost of this output under the constant and variable returns to scale assumptions. This procedure does not...

Firms within a state, states within a country, and countries across the world are continuously striving to enhance their competitiveness in the present age of globalization. This paper defines competitiveness of a production unit as the relative cost of production per unit of output. Basic...

In most countries the government is empowered by the Constitution to acquire privately owned land for public use on payment of fair compensation for the land acquired. For infrastructure projects like a highway or a dam, the land acquired remains under public ownership. In many cases, however,...

The Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) efficiency score obtained for an individual firm is a point estimate without any confidence interval around it. In recent years, researchers have resorted to bootstrapping in order to generate empirical distributions of efficiency scores. This procedure...

Lovell and Rouse (LR) have recently proposed a modification of the standard DEA model that overcomes the infeasibility problem often encountered in computing super-efficiency. In the LR procedure one appropriately scales up the observed input vector (scale down the output vector) of the relevant...

In this paper we use data from the years 1997–2003 to evaluate the size efficiency, as distinct from scale efficiency, of Indian banks. Following Maindiratta [Maindiratta A (1990) J Econ 46:39–56] we consider a bank to be “too large” if breaking it up into a number of smaller units would...

The dual cost function is partially super-additive when an output quantity bundle of a given quality can be produced at a lower cost by breaking up the output into a number of smaller bundles of the same quality to be produced by several firms instead of the entire bundle being produced by a...