The constant returns to scale assumption maintained by neoclassical theorists for justifying the black-box structure of production technology in long run does not necessarily allow one to infer that there are no scale benefits available in its sub-technologies. Most of real-life production...

For effective ship manufacturing, a ship is divided into hundreds of properly sized blocks in the design stage. Each block is produced in its own manufacturing process, and subsequently the blocks are assembled into the body of a ship. Performance evaluation of the block manufacturing process...

Conventional data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods assume that input and output variables are continuous. However, in many real managerial cases, some inputs and/or outputs can only take integer values. Simply rounding the performance targets to the nearest integers can lead to misleading...