Cross-efficiency evaluation in data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been developed under the assumption of constant returns to scale (CRS), and no valid attempts have been made to apply the cross-efficiency concept to the variable returns to scale (VRS) condition. This is due to the fact that negative VRS cross-efficiency arises for some decision-making units (DMUs). Since there exist many insta...

This research applies Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodology to evaluate the efficiency of units within a large-scale network of petroleum distribution facilities in the USA. Multiple inputs and outputs are incorporated into a broad set of DEA models, yielding a comprehensive approach to evaluating supply chain efficiency. This study empirically separates three recognized, important and ye...

Cryptographic multilinear map is a useful tool for constructing numerous secure protocols and Graded Encoding System (GES) is an approximate concept of multilinear map. In multilinear map context, there are several important issues, mainly about security and efficiency. All early stage candidate multilinear maps are recently broken by so-called zeroizing attack, so that it is highly required to...

Traditional super-efficiency data envelopment analysis (DEA) models rank efficient units under the assumption of constant returns to scale (CRS). However, infeasibility may occur in super-efficiency models under variable returns to scale (VRS). This paper proposes a modified VRS super-efficiency DEA model to deal with infeasibility by relaxing the convexity constraint 1, 0 1 n j j j λ = ≠ = ∑ t...

This paper examines the cost efficiency in the nursing home industry, an issue of concern to Swiss policy makers because of the explosive growth of national expenditure on elderly care and the aging of the population. A stochastic cost frontier model with a translog function has been applied to a balanced panel data of 1780 observations from 356 nursing homes operating over five years (1998-200...

Incentivizing Efficiency in Societal-Scale Cyber-Physical Systems

Present evolution of logistics networks is characterized by a progressive increase of the network complexity and the opportunity of organizing management structures composed by local decision-makers (usually denoted “agents”). As much the system complexity and the number of intelligent agents grow, as much the system response uncertainty seems to grow also: this suggests to have greater attenti...

The mass transfer efficiency and phase flow capacity of a 42.5-cm-diameter (i.d.1 sieve tray extractor has been investigated. The extraction of acetone from water with toluene was chosen because of the large amount of data for comparison with the performance of other devices, and particularly because of available data for a smaller sieve tray extractor tested in the same laboratory. For capacit...

The concept of network efficiency, recently proposed to characterize the properties of small-world networks, is here used to study the effects of errors and attacks on scale-free networks. Two different kinds of scale-free networks, i.e. networks with power law P(k), are considered: 1) scale-free networks with no local clustering produced by the Barabasi-Albert model and 2) scale-free networks ...

This research investigates scale efficiency in the Canadian Insurance Industry using an intertemporal product differentiation oligopoly model estimated on a panel of federally chartered insurance companies for the period 1988 through 1991. Significant short-run scale economies are found with respect to both the output of new policies and the stock of policies issued in previous periods. An anal...