Inside the Black Box: What Makes a Bank Efficient?

A decade of econometric research has shown that X-efficiency dominates scale and scope as the drivers of inefficiency in the U.S. banking industry. However, this research falls short in explaining the causes of the high degree of X-efficiency in the industry. This paper summarizes a four-year research effort to understand the drivers of this inefficiency. Key findings from this research, based on the most comprehensive studies to date of management practices in the retail banking industry, give insight into the drivers of X-efficiency. The paper provides a comprehensive framework for the analysis of X-efficiency in financial services. This paper was presented at the Wharton Financial Institutions Center's conference onRetail Banking, Services, Efficiency, Technology Management, Human Resource Management

Evolutionary optimization of production materials workflow processes

AbstractWe present an evolutionary optimisation technique for stochastic production processes, which is able to find improved production materials workflow processes with respect to arbitrary combinations of numerical quantities associated with the production process. Working from a core fragment of the BPMN language, we employ an evolutionary algorithm where stochastic model checking is used as a fitness function to determine the degree of improvement of candidate processes derived from the original process through mutation and cross-over operations. We illustrate this technique using a case study where a baked goods company seeks to improve production time while simultaneously minimising the cost and use of resources

A Logical Verification Methodology for Service-Oriented Computing

We introduce a logical verification methodology for checking behavioural properties of service-oriented computing systems. Service properties are described by means of SocL, a branching-time temporal logic that we have specifically designed to express in an effective way distinctive aspects of services, such as, e.g., acceptance of a request, provision of a response, and correlation among service requests and responses. Our approach allows service properties to be expressed in such a way that they can be independent of service domains and specifications. We show an instantiation of our general methodology that uses the formal language COWS to conveniently specify services and the expressly developed software tool CMC to assist the user in the task of verifying SocL formulae over service specifications. We demonstrate feasibility and effectiveness of our methodology by means of the specification and the analysis of a case study in the automotive domain