Germany's water supply industry is characterized by a multitude of utilities and widely diverging prices, possibly resulting from structural differences beyond the control of firms' management, but also from inefficiencies. In this article we use Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier...

This paper measures energy efficiency improvements of US single-family homes between 1997 and 2001 using a two-stage procedure. In the first stage, an indicator of energy efficiency is derived by means of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), and the analogy between the DEA estimator and traditional...

This paper analyzes research efficiency at the industry level in manufacturing for 13 European member and four nonmember countries during 2000 and 2004. A unique dataset was compiled that matches patent applications at the European Patent Office (EPO) to industry-specific R&D inputs from EU...

In this paper we compare two flexible estimators of technical efficiency in a cross-sectional setting: the nonparametric kernel SFA estimator of Fan, Li and Weersink (1996) to the nonparametric bias corrected DEA estimator of Kneip, Simar and Wilson (2008). We assess the finite sample...

Die zunehmende Diskontinuität, Unsicherheit und Komplexität der Makro- und Mikroumwelt eines Unternehmens, stellt Firmen vor große Herausforderungen. Um den Managementprozess, der sich aus Planung, Umsetzung und Kontrolle zusammensetzt, optimal zu gestalten, werden spezielle Managementtools...

Management system standards (MSS), such as ISO standards, TQM, etc. are widely -used standards adopted by millions of organizations worldwide. It is still an unclear question whether these standards are beneficial for an organization, besides the fact that they might be required or expected by...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the implementation of a performance management system using the balanced scorecard (BSC) within Romanian small and medium sized enterprises (SME). This is a casebased methodological approach. This ensured that the issues were appraised in both an...

Although financial indicators are most often used to measure organizational efficiency, contemporary research suggests that more consideration should be given to non-material factors that can be enveloped by different non-parametric techniques. However, there is no method powerful enough to...