The paper describes and details a design science approach for how to explore the impact of emergent technologies on the performance frontier in operations management. The process is illustrated through an in-depth case where the performance frontier was affected through finding RFID and agent applications that enable a move to simpler integrating mechanisms. The discovered solution designs simp...

In this paper an attempt is made to explain the basic concept of efficiency, frontier production function, technical efficiency, deterministic frontier, and stochastic frontier. Efficiency of a firm/industry refers to its performance in the utilization of resources at its disposal and is a relative concept. Technical efficiency of a production function is defined as the maximum quantity of outp...

BACKGROUND In recent years, there has been growing interest in measuring the efficiency of hospitals in Iran and several studies have been conducted on the topic. The main objective of this paper was to review studies in the field of hospital efficiency and examine the estimated technical efficiency (TE) of Iranian hospitals. METHODS Persian and English databases were searched for studies rel...

Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech, Durham Hall, Blacksburg, VA 24060, USA b System Performance Laboratory, Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech, Northern Virginia Center, 7054 Haycock Road, Falls Church, VA, USA Center for Highway Asset Management Programs (CHAMPS), Via Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Virgin...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is an axiomatic, mathematical programming approach to productive efficiency analysis and performance measurement. This paper shows that DEA can be interpreted as a nonparametric least squares regression subject to shape constraints on production frontier and sign constraints on residuals. Thus, DEA can be seen as a nonparametric counter-part of the corrected ordi...

Article history: Accepted 10 November 2015 Available online xxxx This paper investigates the role of heterogeneity in the insurance sector. Here, heterogeneity is represented by different types of insurance provided and regions served. Using a balanced panel data set on Brazilian insurance companies as a case study, results corroborate this underlying hypothesis of heterogeneity's impact on per...