Purpose: This paper examines the roles of the balanced scorecard (BSC) in a long-term perspective and with a large deployment along numerous hierarchical levels. For this purpose, we use a longitudinal analysis of an implementation in a mutual insurance company. Design/methodology/approach: We...

In this paper we analyze the performance of cities under the angle of the productivity by developing a comparative analysis based on the benchmarking and the best observed practices. We consider in this paper ninety seven French cities. The first objective is to succeed in revealing the best...

In this paper, we introduce two new indicators of the operational and the financial performance of bank branches networks. We develop an alternative approach to the traditional productivity measures to take into account size, environmental and structural effects in the benchmark process. We use...

We extend the standard frontier efficiency models (data envelopment analysis [DEA] and stochastic frontier analysis [SFA]) by allowing the “decision making units” (DMUs) whose performances are assessed to consist of two different levels within hierarchical organizations. Generally, the lower...

A rather simple but crucial question in economics and management is why one firm makes more profit than another. However the answer remains unclear because of the large range of factors that might explain differential profit. In this paper we propose a decomposition of the profit differential...