For some investors their own personal investment counsellors address their investment strategy; for others automated means are used. To protect investors, the Canadian Government has enacted the "Know Your Client" Act requiring that all investment dealers and vendors of securities must know...

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...

In this paper we show that given a utility threshold Luenberger’s benefit function correctly represents individual preferences as long as specific reference commodity bundles are considered. We further show a condition which is sufficient for reaching Pareto optimality that generalizes...

In for-profit organizations, profit efficiency decomposition is considered important since estimates on profit drivers are of practical use to managers in their decision making. Profit efficiency is traditionally due to two sources – technical efficiency and allocative efficiency. The...

The determination of closest efficient targets has attracted increasing interest of researchers in recent Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) literature. Several methods have been introduced in this respect. However, only a few attempts exist that analyze the implications of using closest targets on...

As a measure of overall technical inefficiency, the Directional Distance Function (DDF) introduced by Chambers, Chung, and Färe ties the potential output expansion and input contraction together through a single parameter. By duality, the DDF is related to a measure of profit inefficiency,...

We discuss how to properly decompose economic efficiency when the underlying technology is non-homothetic using alternative allocative and technical efficiency criteria. We first show that only under the production of one output and assuming the particular case of constant returns to scale...