A supply chain is a set of suppliers, manufactures and distributors, which are linked together. The first chain is a supplier and the last one is customers. What is the most important in supply chain are highquality products by the least cost and the most benefit. In this regard, each input and output and intermediate have unit price and unit cost information. The cost-minimization and the prof...

This study investigates the profit efficiency (PROFEFF) of small banks (those under $500 million in total assets) for 1990–96. Assuming that small banks and large banks use the same production technology, we find, consistent with Berger and Mester [J. Bank. Finance 21 (1997) 875], that small banks are more profit efficient than large banks. Small banks in non-metropolitan statistical areas (non...

In the literature of strategic management, most of the research on profitability focuses on conditions under which a firm can enjoy extraordinary profits in the long run, despite the efforts of its competitors. This paper extends this line of thinking by considering not only the role played by idiosyncratic resources in the final equilibrium, but also the dynamic process by which the sector app...

This paper investigates how hospital affiliation in a multi-hospital system (contract managed, owned, sponsored), the number of system hospitals, HMO and PPO contracts, and other factors, impacts hospital cost efficiency. Using a 1996-1999 panel of 248 hospitals, results show that for urban hospitals, increasing the number of hospitals in the system, system ownership and contract management/spo...

This paper studies the competition between firms for influencers in a network. Firms spend effort to convince influencers to recommend their products. The analysis identifies the offensive and defensive roles of spending on influencers. The value of an influencer only depends on the in-degree distribution of the influence network. Influencers who exclusively cover a high number of consumers are...

In this paper we tackle the problem of maximizing cooperation among self-interested agents in a resource exchange environment. Our main concern is the design of mechanisms for maximizing cooperation among self-interested agents in a way that their profits increase by exchanging or trading with resources. Although dynamic coalition formation and partner switching (rewiring) have been shown to pr...

This paper develops a slack-based decomposition of profit efficiency based on a directional distance function.

In this paper, a new method is proposed to optimize a multi-response optimization problem based on the Taguchi method for the processes where controllable factors are the smaller-the-better (STB)-type variables and the analyzer desires to find an optimal solution with smaller amount of controllable factors. In such processes, the overall output quality of the product should be maximized while t...