1,721,195 research outputs found
Ecological Efficiency Based Ranking of Cities: A Combined DEA Cross-Efficiency and Shannon’s Entropy Method
Get PDFIn this paper, a method is proposed to calculate a comprehensive index that calculates the ecological efficiency of a city by combining together the measurements provided by some Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) cross-efficiency models using the Shannon’s entropy index. The DEA models include non-discretionary uncontrollable inputs, desirable and undesirable outputs.
The method is implemented to compute the ecological efficiency of a sample of 116 Italian provincial capital cities in 2011 as a case study. Results emerging from the case study show that the proposed index has a good discrimination power and performs better than the ranking provided by the Sole24Ore, which is generally used in Italy to conduct benchmarking studies. While the sustainability index proposed by the Sole24Ore utilizes a set of subjective weights to aggregate individual indicators, the adoption of the DEA based method limits the subjectivity to the selection of the models. The ecological efficiency measurements generated by the implementation of the method for the Italian cities indicate that they perform very differently, and generally largest cities in terms of population size achieve a higher efficiency score
The analysis of the cost-revenue production cycle efficiency of the Italian airports: A NSBM DEA approach
No full textThis paper measures the efficiency of Italian airports using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Particularly, the efficiency of an airport is evaluated at three different stages of its cost-revenue production cycle, i.e. cost-operations-revenue stages, while network-slack based measure DEA (NSBM-DEA) is adopted to generate efficiency measurements for the airports at each stage. Results show that the suggested modeling approach has a better discrimination capability than the traditional black-box DEA model and provides important insights for policy makers and airport concessionaires useful for improving industry performance and airport management
Benchmarking Website Performance in the Public Sector: A Non Parametric Approach
Get PDFIn this paper the outcome of a benchmarking study that compares organization websites in the public sector is presented. In particular, 31 websites of Italian public universities are compared considering the website cognitive efficiency as a measure of its overall performance, i.e. usability and accessibility. Data Envelopment Analysis is performed to generate a measurement for the cognitive efficiency, while cross-efficiency is used to alleviate the weak discriminating capability of the basic DEA model, and have a ranking of sample websites. Seven university websites are 100% cognitive efficient and average efficiency is at 61.63%. Results also show that website cognitive efficiency is positively influenced by the user perceived attractiveness and negatively by the time over-consumption during navigatio
Are Public-Private Partnerships a Source of Greater Efficiency in Water Supply? Results of a Non-Parametric Performance Analysis Relating to the Italian Industry
Get PDFThis article reports the outcome of a performance study of the water service provision industry in Italy. The study evaluates the efficiency of 21 “private or public-private” equity and 32 “public” equity water service operators and investigates controlling factors. In particular, the influence that the operator typology and service management nature - private vs. public - has on efficiency is assessed. The study employed a two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis methodology. In the first stage, the operational efficiency of water supply operators is calculated by implementing a conventional BCC
DEA model, that uses both physical infrastructure and financial input and output variables to explore economies of scale. In the second stage, bootstrapped DEA and Tobit regression are performed to estimate the influence that a number of environmental factors have on water supplier efficiency. The results show that the integrated water provision industry in Italy is characterized by operational inefficiencies of service operators, and scale and agglomeration economies may have a not negligible effect on efficiency. In addition, the operator typology and its geographical location affect efficiency
An Efficiency Analysis of Municipal Solid Waste Collection in Italy between 2010 and 2019
No full textThis paper presents an efficiency analysis of the collection of municipal solid waste in Italian provinces between 2010 and 2019. Particularly, the waste service efficiency of the 110 provinces was measured by implementing non-parametric Slack Based Measure Data Envelopment Analysis (SBM-DEA). A dynamic distributional analysis of efficiencies from 2010 to 2019 was also performed to investigate the behavior of the provinces efficiency in the analysed period specifically considering their size as a discriminant factor influencing it. To this aim a kernel-based method was used. Results show that the efficiency of the MSW collection service in the Italian provinces has increased steadily. The average efficiency grew from 44.7% to 53.0% during the period from 2010 to 2019, following the improvement in the sorted waste collection rate. Furthermore, smaller provinces performed better than larger ones
A peeling DEA-game cross efficiency procedure to classify suppliers
Get PDFThis paper proposes a non-parametric procedure to classify suppliers. The procedure adopts a peeling approach and Data Envelopment Analysis-game cross efficiency (DEA-GXE) method to group a set of suppliers into classes. In DEA-GXE each supplier is seen as a player competing in an uncooperative environment, seeking to maximize efficiency under the condition that the other suppliers’cross-efficiency does not deteriorate. The procedure is useful when there is a long list of suppliers that should be assessed by the customer, providing an agile decision-making tool
Measuring Technical Efficiency of Cars: A Field Investigation in the Italian Domestic Market
No full textThis paper implemented Data Envelopment Analysis to develop a measure of technical efficiency (TE) for a car. The measurement of TE uses published technical data and judgements by industry experts. It is assumed that the technical value of a car is a function of a functional feature performance set of the product delivered to users when bearing some usage and ownership costs. TE is calculated for a sample of 216 cars sold in the Italian market from the 1970s to the early 1990s
The trade-off between cost efficiency and public service quality: a non parametric frontier analysis of Italian major municipalities
No full textThis paper presents the results of an empirical study aimed at evaluating the cost efficiency of 108 Italian major municipalities, and investigating to what extent the municipality efficiency is also associated to the effectiveness of public expenditure, and consequently to quality of services offered to citizens. The study implements Data Envelopment Analysis to calculate the efficiency score and understand if it is influenced by scale economies and determine the type of these economies. For this purpose, every municipality was modeled as a production function using 6 cost item inputs and 2 outputs. Finally, the study implemented a truncated regression equation using the bootstrapped efficiency estimate as the dependent variable, and a selection of indicators measuring the quality of public services offered in the context as the independent variables.
Results reveal that there exist important scale-inefficiencies in a number of municipalities, but unexpectedly a great amount of inefficiencies are caused by decreasing returns to scale. Additionally, the study suggests that a trade-off between expenditure efficiency and effectiveness, i.e. the quality of public service, seems to exist
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