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...

In this paper we deal with the measurement of technical efficiency (or X-efficiency) of institutions whose operations might be significantly affected by macroeconomic, environmental and non-controllable factors. For this purpose we introduce a four-stage DEA methodology based on the approach...

This paper is aimed at exploring how X-efficiency or management quality is associated with one of the most vivid forms of international banking, that is, entering new markets by setting up foreign subsidiaries. The analysis focuses on the supposition that management quality ought to be one of...

The traditional approach to measuring allocative efficiency is based on input prices, which are rarely known at the firm level. This paper proposes a new approach to measure allocative efficiency which is based on the output-oriented distance to the frontier in a profit – technical efficiency...

In this article an application-oriented approach to analyze the cost of conformance of services, i. e. ‘cost of customer satisfaction’, is presented. Contrary to quality costing methods in manufacturing industries, which are concerned about objective quality standards, services have to...