This study examined whether the cost efficiency measures were invariant to the choice of parametric and nonparametric methods for a sample of 183 wheat farms. In the deterministic nonparametric method, the economic, scale and overall efficiency results were invariant to the dimensionality. Only...

The issue of quality and its relationship with efficiency and performance is a crucial operational issue in many fields of study including production economics, operations research, engineering and business management. In this paper we provide a methodology for identifying latent quality...

Permutation techniques, where one recompute the test statistic over permutations of data, have a long history in statistics and have become increasingly useful as the availability of computational power has increased. Until now, no permutation tests for examining returns to scale assumptions,...

Nonparametric methods have been widely used for assessing the performance of organizations in the private and public sector. The most popular ones are based on envelopment estimators, like the FDH or DEA estimators, that estimate the attainable sets and its efficient boundary by enveloping the...

Scale characteristics are key properties of production functions that determine optimal firm sizes, and have considerable policy implications for sectors undergoing restructuring. However, estimates of scale characteristics typically vary with the assumptions of the underlying empirical model....

Purpose - While there exist many surveys on the use stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), many important issues and techniques in SFA were not well elaborated in the previous surveys, namely, regular models, copula modeling, nonparametric estimation by Grenander’s method of sieves, empirical...

This paper describes a non-parametric, unconditional, hyperbolic quantile estimator that unlike traditional non-parametric frontier estimators is both robust to data outliers and has a root-n convergence rate. We use this estimator to examine changes in the efficiency and productivity of U.S....

The present paper aims to access the performance of the Indian Fabrics Industry (IFI) across firms through estimating its efficiency scores covering the period 1991 to 2015 considering Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) firm level data using Nonparametric Method of Data Envelopment...