We analyze the simplest Condorcet cycle with three players and three alternatives within a strategic bargaining model with recognition probabilities and costless delay. Mixed consistent subgame perfect equilibria exist whenever the geometric mean of the agents’ risk coefficients, ratios of utility differences between alternatives, is at most one. Equilibria are generically unique, Pareto effici...

Studies on the cost structures of banks tend to find that economies of scale are negligible whereas improvements in X-efficiency facilitate much larger cost reductions. The implication is that banks should reduce costs by emulating industry best practice rather than increasing size. This interpretation is questionable because it is based on comparisons of two different economic concepts scale e...

An economic measure of scale efficiency is the ratio of the minimum average cost to the average cost at the actual output level of a firm. It is easily measured by the ratio of the total cost of this output under the constant and variable returns to scale assumptions. This procedure does not identify the output level where the average cost reaches a minimum. This paper proposes a nonparametric ...

A stable test for checking if a matrix is a nonsingular M -matrix is presented. Its computational cost is, in the worst case, O(n2) elementary operations higher than the computational cost of Gaussian elimination. The test can be applied to check if a nonnegative matrix has spectral radius less than 1.

In an effort to improve health service delivery and achieve better health outcomes, the World Health Organization (WHO) has called for improved efficiency of health care systems to better use the available funding. This study aims to examine the efficiency of national health systems using longitudinal country-level data. Data on health spending per capita, infant mortality rate (IMR), under 5 m...

the different model specifications have been proposed to estimate time-varying technical efficiency in the last two decades. these models have resulted different efficiency scores based on their built-in specifications. this study investigates the temporal pattern of technical efficiency based on cornwell, sickles, and schmidt (css, 1990) as well as lee and schmidt (ls, 1993) models. in order t...