Efficiency Of Production Units Research Articles

Measuring the effects of undesirable outputs on the efficiency of production units

The data envelopment analysis technique produces higher efficiency scores for the assessed decision making units (DMUs) when more input/output factors are considered. This feature generates an intuitively unreasonable result in which the efficiency of a DMU measured considering the accompanying undesirable outputs is greater than or equal to that measured without considering them. In order to obtain a reasonable measure of efficiency, this paper proposes a concept for determining the minimum amount of undesirable outputs that a DMU is allowed to generate based on the assertion of weak disposability, and the results are used to construct the production frontier. The efficiency of the DMUs measured from this frontier can be decomposed into two parts, one of which shows the efficiency of consuming the observed inputs to produce the observed desirable outputs and the other of which, a reduction factor, shows the effect of producing excessive amounts of undesirable outputs on efficiency. A case of thirty paper mills taken from the literature is used to illustrate this idea. The results are helpful for DMU decision-makers to identify sources of inefficiency and for the government to formulate standards for generating allowable amounts of undesirable outputs.

AGRICULTORES FAMILIARES E AS CARACTERÍSTICAS DO PROCESSO DE TOMADA DE DECISÃO: O CASO DOS VITICULTORES DE FLORES DA CUNHA - RS - BRASIL

: In the face of the constant development of Brazilian wine market, Gauchos producers have been organizing to provide the demands on the volume and quality of final product commercialized. Especially, these economic agents confront challenges inherent in agribusiness, such as the difficulty of access to information and opportunistic behavior from transactional partners. Therefore, the study aims to understand the decision-making process of the family farmers that produce grapes in the mountainous region of Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil, as a function of socioeconomic scenario of the production chain and the efficiency of production units. To this end, information was collected on existing studies about the production chain and interviews were conducted with eleven producers living in Flores da Cunha city. It is emphasized that the process of decision making of economic agents is conducted in the collective of the family, more focused on everyday issues. However, prevailing the peculiarities of limited rationality of economic agents. Therefore, always oriented to the achievement of greater efficiency of the productive activity and social welfare of the family, the decisions reflect the broad range of objective and subjective aspects surrounding farmers, in accordance with the technical and economic performances and between production systems that compose the rural property.

Slice models in general purpose modeling systems: An application to DEA

Slice models are collections of mathematical programs with the same structure but different data. Because they involve multiple problems, slice models tend to be data-intensive and time consuming to solve. However, by incorporating additional information in the solution process, such as the common structure and shared data, we are able to solve these models much more efficiently. In addition because of the efficiency we achieve, we are able to process much larger real-world problems and extend slice model results through the application of more computationally-intensive procedures. In this article, we focus on slice models arising from Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). In DEA problems, slice models are used to evaluate the efficiency of production units. Using a smoothed bootstrap technique, confidence intervals can be obtained for the resulting efficiency measurements, however at such a high computational cost that often this analysis cannot be done. Under the techniques that we describe for improving the solution efficiency, not only are we able to solve DEA problems with large numbers of units, but we are also able to evaluate the confidence intervals.

Evaluating dynamic efficiency by optimal control

Some control-theoretic methods for evaluating the efficiency of production units in dynamic situations are developed and empirically illustrated on the basis of adjustment cost theory.