No abstract

This paper investigates whether players' individual- and club-level efficiency has substantial impact on club performance in the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL). Using data from 1990 to 2000, and a stochastic frontier model, we propose a different way to measure club-level efficiency. Our empirical results indicate that club-level efficiency is crucial to club performance, measured by the winning percentage. Although the literature shows that some inefficient clubs with abundant resources are still very successful on the diamond, our results confirm that club-level efficiency has a moderate impact on the success of a baseball club in the CPBL. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper develops a range directional distance data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to simultaneously deal with the problems of negative data and undesirable outputs in the study of performance measurement with two-stage DEA. We report on the development of this model to handle both positive and negative data in a DEA framework and accommodate the problem of undesirable intermediate outputs in the first stage of operational processes. Unlike previous two-stage DEA models we allow for a nonuniform abatement factor imposing on stage 1’ production technology. Such a model is then applied to evaluate Taiwanese bank efficiencies both at the operational stage and profitability stage in banking activities based on a data set consisting of 35 domestic banks in Taiwan in the period 2007. The results indicate that, by the range directional two-stage data envelopment analysis model, the operational efficiency was smaller than the profitability efficiency. Many banks generated too many performing loans in which independent banks should reduce more performing loans than financial holding company subsidiary banks. Both the ratio of investments to loans and the ratio of nonperforming loans to performing loans did not have significant contributions to the efficiency. This paper is able to provide information for bank operators and researchers on the managerial and strategic implications of how negative data and undesirable outputs affect efficiency and how to measure efficiency appropriately.

The ecological agriculture (hereinafter referred to as eco-agriculture) concept has grown rapidly in Taiwan in recent years. More and more successful eco-agriculture projects have thus sprouted up in Taiwan, and so a quantitative evaluation model of such projects becomes critically important for improving public understanding of eco-agriculture and for providing a basis for policy analysis. This research thus proposes a quantitative evaluation model for eco-agriculture and analyzes the empirical data collected. We take four farms that practice eco-agriculture in eastern Taiwan for the estimation of direct benefits by surveying farmers about their revenues and costs of crop yields. To evaluate indirect benefits, we employ the Contingent Value Method (CVM) to investigate the willingness-to-pay (WTP) of users and non-users to support eco-agriculture. Results from the direct benefit estimation indicate that eco-agriculture adoption is unlikely to improve the local livelihoods of farming communities. In terms of indirect benefit estimation, eco-agriculture is beneficial to society, but based on our analysis of the direct benefits, these indirect benefits fail to be transformed into profits, showing that eco-agriculture exhibits positive externalities. This constitutes unavoidable challenges for eco-agriculture to be sustainable if these positive externalities cannot be internalized.

No abstract