This paper applies a new variant of data envelopment analysis model to examine the performance of Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India. The findings show a significant heterogeneity visible in the cost efficiency scores within 19 years. The decline in performance after 1994-95 can be taken...

There are increasing concerns about how increase in congestion can adversely affect output as well as about the relative benefit-cost ratio or return on investment associated with alternative projects or policies to address those problems. Regardless of what policy strategies are used to address...

This paper critically re-examines the concept of returns to scale vis-à-vis economies of scale since the writings of Adam Smith by relating the former to the concept of production unit and the latter to the concept of firm. Though to date some valuable progress has been made exploring the...

This paper briefly reviews the existing methods of capacity utilization in nonparametric framework from economic perspectives, and then suggests an alternative in the light of limitations therein. In the spirit of work by Coelli et al. [Coelli, T.J., Grifell-Tatje, E., Perelman, S., 2002....

Estimation of efficiency of firms in a non-competitive market characterized by heterogeneous inputs and outputs along with their varying prices is questionable when factor-based technology sets are used in data envelopment analysis (DEA). In this scenario, a value-based technology becomes an...

Grifell-Tatje and Lovell (Grifell-Tatje, E., Lovell, C.A.K., 1999. Profits and productivity. Management Science 45, 1177-1193) made significant contributions to the literature on the extended radial DEA framework by decomposing profit change into six mutually exclusive components. Their...

In non-competitive market characterized by heterogeneous firms and price uncertainty, we discuss the measurement of economies of scale and scope due to process indivisibilities arising from the task-specific production processes of multiproduct firm. Two competing DEA cost models — one based...

This contribution is an attempt to make an exhaustive critical review of various possible estimation methods of scale economies in a non-parametric data envelopment analysis approach. Three types of technology structure - piecewise linear, piecewise log-linear, and FDH - are found to be adopted...

This chapter applies a new variant of the data envelopment analysis model to examine the performance of Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India. The findings show a significant heterogeneity in the cost efficiency scores over the course of 19 years. A decline in performance after 1994–1995...

We propose a new scheme for measuring scale elasticity of production based on a new cost efficiency model developed in Tone (2002). Comparing our model with classical model we establish the superiority of our model over the latter based on the premise that the classical estimates of cost...