Research on productive efficiency at the firm level has developed as an important and active strand of research the last decades, both within operations research, management science and economics. However, the interests pursued within the fields have had some differences regarding sound...

In this paper, the authors present an EOQ model with substitutions between products and a dynamic inventory replenishment policy. The key assumption is that many products in the market are substitutable at different levels, and that, in most cases, a customer who discovers that a desired product...

Aware of the importance of developing new alternatives to improve the performance of the companies, our purpose in this paper is to develop a medium term production planning model that deals with the concepts of Partnerships and Reverse Logistics. Our model takes advantage of the synergies of...

Exporting countries are concerned that sanitary standards might shield domestic industry from foreign competition. This study analyzes economic effects of changes in Western Hemisphere sanitary requirements on broiler trade in the Americas. A mathematical programming model detects that if Brazil...

This paper provides expressions for solutions of a one-dimensional global optimization problem using an adjoint variable which represents the available one-sided improvements up to the interval “horizon.” Interpreting the problem in terms of optimal stopping or optimal starting, the solution...

We study the investment behaviour of a producer maximizing the present value of his firm over an infinite time horizon and having investments bounded below by zero (irreversibility of capital) and bounded above by his current profit (capital market imperfections). In our model the interest rate,...

Conventional data envelopment analysis (DEA) for measuring the relative efficiency of a set of decision-making units (DMUs) requires the observations to have precise values. When observations are imprecise and represented by interval values, the efficiencies are also expected to reflect interval...

This paper focuses on the construction of a composite indicator for the knowledge based economy using imprecise data. Specifically, for some indicators we only have information on the bounds of the interval within which the true value is believed to lie. The proposed approach is based on a...

Measuring productive efficiency is an important research strand within fields of economics, management science and operations research. One definition of efficiency is the proportional scaling needed for observations of an inefficient unit to be projected onto an efficient production function...

Attempts can be found in the DEA literature to identify returns to scale at efficient interior points of the production possibility set on the basis of returns to scale at points of the corresponding reference sets. However, an opposite approach is put forward in this paper, advocating that...