Congestion effect on renewable energy production efficiency in Europe

In the last decade the renewable energy facilities have become very important for generating electricity in Europe. Estimating the production efficiency of renewable energy industry is thus a major concern of governments. This paper implements Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to measure efficiency in the generation of electricity from renewable sources during 2002-2011 in 31 European countries. As input congestion may introduce bias in the efficiency analysis, an improved DEA model is used to correct and avoid efficiency underestimation

Knowledge Search Strategies in the Biotechnology Domain: A Patent Benchmarking Analysis

This paper offers a new interpretive perspective to investigate factors of researchers productivity, moving from a personal features/resource endowment view to a behavioral one centered on the knowledge search. Little work has indeed been carried out on the relationship between the research productivity and the scientist knowledge search behaviors. Three knowledge search dimensions are taken in account: search type, search focus and search dynamics. Using data relative to 873 biotechnology patents granted from 1960 to 2007 to 255 academic scholars that are affiliated to 36 Italian universities, this paper investigates if a particular knowledge search behavior is associated to greater patenting rates

A nonparametric economic analysis of the US natural gas transmission infrastructure: efficiency, trade-offs and emerging industry configurations

This paper presents a study aimed at measuring the efficiency of the transmission segment of the US natural gas industry from an economic perspective. The gas transmission infrastructure is modeled as an economic production function and a multi-stage modeling approach based on the implementation of Data Envelopment Analysis is employed to obtain an efficiency measure in a two-dimension performance space, i.e., cost and revenue-efficiency. This approach allows taking into account conflicting business goals. The study also performs cluster analysis to uncover homogeneous efficiency profiles relative to the gas transmission systems to explore determinants of efficiency rates, and trade-off situations. A sample containing 80 US gas transmission systems is used in the analysis. Results indicate that the transmission segment of the US gas industry has considerable inefficiencies, while average cost and revenue-efficiency scores are 0.324 and 0.301, and only three transmission systems achieve high scores on both efficiency dimensions. Cluster analysis identified seven configurations. In three of them there are no trade-off situations between cost and revenue efficiencies. However, only in one of them gas transmission systems have high efficiencies. The remaining four configurations exhibit trade-off situations having different intensity. Such trade-offs can be determined by the gas transmission infrastructure size

Ecological Efficiency Based Ranking of Cities: A Combined DEA Cross-Efficiency and Shannon's Entropy Method

In this paper, a method is proposed to calculate a comprehensive index that calculates the ecological efficiency of a city by combining together the measurements provided by some Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) cross-efficiency models using the Shannon's entropy index. The DEA models include non-discretionary uncontrollable inputs, desirable and undesirable outputs. The method is implemented to compute the ecological efficiency of a sample of 116 Italian provincial capital cities in 2011 as a case study. Results emerging from the case study show that the proposed index has a good discrimination power and performs better than the ranking provided by the Sole24Ore, which is generally used in Italy to conduct benchmarking studies. While the sustainability index proposed by the Sole24Ore utilizes a set of subjective weights to aggregate individual indicators, the adoption of the DEA based method limits the subjectivity to the selection of the models. The ecological efficiency measurements generated by the implementation of the method for the Italian cities indicate that they perform very differently, and generally largest cities in terms of population size achieve a higher efficiency score

Evaluating Technical Efficiency of Italian Major Municipalities: A Data Envelopment Analysis model

This paper presents findings of an exploratory study aimed at assessing expenditure efficiency of 103 Italian major municipalities. The study implements Data Envelopment Analysis to calculate an efficiency score and investigate economies of scale. Findings reveal that there exist scale inefficiencies in a number of municipalities that need an in depth investigatio

A Benchmarking Index to Compare High-performing Computing Systems

An index to compare supercomputers is proposed in the study. This index is based on the concept of technical efficiency and is developed adopting a non-parametric technique, e.g. Data Envelopment Analysis. The index is used to calculate the technical efficiency of 500 high-performing computing systems listed in the TOP500 supercomputers database. Finally, statistical analysis is performed to assess the weight that some supercomputers characteristics have on their efficiency

Efficiency vs Effectiveness: A Benchmarking Study on European Healthcare Systems

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