Search results for "Inefficiency"
showing 10 items of 55 documents
Pump Efficiency Analysis of Waste Water Treatment Plants: A Data Mining Approach Using Signal Decomposition for Decision Making
2017
In Waste Water Treatment Plants (WWTPs), the pump systems are one of the most energy intensive processes. An efficient energy management of pumps should produce environmental and economic benefits. In this paper, we propose a daily data-driven approach for a detailed pump efficiency analysis that reduces the time gap between an inefficiency and its detection, provides detailed information for decision making by using new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and detects inefficient pump set-ups and designs. The proposed approach based on signal decomposition relies on sensors generally available in WWTPs, e.g. daily pump inflow and energy consumption. Moreover, it allows decomposing the data s…
Changes in the total costs of the English and Welsh water and sewerage industry: The decomposed effect of price and quantity inputs on efficiency
2020
Abstract Understanding what drives changes in regulated water companies' costs is of great relevance to water regulators. This study decomposes and estimates the change in total costs for a sample of ten water and sewerage companies in England and Wales from 1993 to 2016. The results demonstrate that companies' total costs increased over time due to increases in input prices and input quantity. Any gains obtained from the efficient allocation of resources and technical progress were lost due to mergers and technical inefficiency. Finally, we link our results with the regulatory cycle to evaluate the impact of the regulatory regime on companies' costs and discuss some policy implications.
Conflict and segregation in networks: An experiment on the interplay between individual preferences and social influence
2016
We examine the interplay between a person's individual preference and the social influence others exert. We provide a model of network relationships with conflicting preferences, where individuals are better off coordinating with those around them, but where not all have a preference for the same action. We test our model in an experiment, varying the level of conflicting preferences between individuals. Our findings suggest that preferences are more salient than social influence, under conflicting preferences: subjects relate mainly with others who have the same preferences. This leads to two undesirable outcomes: network segregation and social inefficiency. The same force that helps peopl…
Participation Costs and Inefficiency in Takeover Contests
2010
We consider a takeover in which risk neutral bidders incur private costs to participate to the auction. Supposing that valuations for target firm are common knowledge, we study the optimal strategy of bidders and analyze the takeover result when they get or not toeholds in the target firm. We found that bidder's decision of participation is endogenous. By analyzing bidder's condition of participation, we found that the probability that the potential bidder with the highest valuation will not participate to the control, exists. We show that this probability increases with the size of toeholds possessed by the bidder with low valuation. Nevertheless, the size of toeholds possessed by the bidd…
Important Aspects of Biowastes Collection and Composting in Nigeria
2002
Many of the areas that generate organic waste that could be biotreated are inaccessible for collection because of the lack of accessible roads, poverty of the residents and general neglect of such places by the government authorities. In Lagos in 1999 it was observed that trucks collecting wastes cannot get into 40% of the inner part of the municipalities because the roads are too narrow or blocked by illegal structures. So one-third of the population received no refuse collection service. There is very little knowledge about the treatment of biowaste and the activities are very low. The laws and regulations governing the management of waste, in general, are weak and inefficient. An importa…
The residence permit for third-country nationals who are victims of human trafficking: A double-face instrument between compliance strategy and prote…
2017
Purpose The aim of the present study is to explore institutional design strategies that promote compliance by regulating peculiar sorts of agents, namely, human trafficking victims, starting from the point of view that institutions assume addressee virtue, but instead should consider the hypothesis of non-compliance or that the measures adopted reveal their inefficiency to satisfy the goals they were thought for, or that they are applied to obtain scopes, which are different from the ones they were conceived for. Design/methodology/approach Different methodological approaches, both deductive and inductive, are combined in the present paper, together with comparative and philosophical insig…
Eco-efficiency assessment of olive farms in Andalusia
2012
Abstract Olive farming represents an important source of income and employment in the rural areas of Andalusia (Spain), which is the most important olive oil-producing region in the world. Unfortunately, it also exerts significant environmental pressures with regard to soil erosion, use of polluting inputs, excessive water consumption and biodiversity reduction. This paper uses Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) techniques and pressure distance functions to contribute a farm-level assessment of the eco-efficiency of a sample of 292 Andalusian olive farmers. We distinguish between managerial eco-efficiency and program eco-efficiency, the latter being associated to the different natural conditio…
Eco-efficiency assessment of municipal solid waste services: Influence of exogenous variables.
2020
Abstract Improving the eco-efficiency of municipalities in the provision of municipal solid waste (MSW) services is fundamental in the context of a circular economy. This study evaluates the eco-efficiency of a sample of Spanish municipalities, integrating the total cost as input, recyclable waste as desirable output, and unsorted waste as undesirable output. Following a pioneering approach, the weighted Russell directional distance model (a non-radial data envelopment analysis model) was employed, which allowed us to obtain a global inefficiency score and individual inefficiency scores for each variable integrated in the model. In the second stage of analysis, the potential factors affecti…
Causes of Public Expenditure Inefficiency and Proposals for Their Streamlining
2020
The public sector has continually developed, as new needs of the population have been identified and the expectations of the population regarding the quantity and the quality of the provided services have already been rising. Unlike private management, the public administration has not always been concerned with the way results have been achieved, but, particularly with the results themselves, and, as long as these have been satisfying for the population, the resources employed for obtaining the results were of no much concern. The public administration monopoly in the provision of some services has led to the possibility of generating imbalances between the quality of the provided services…
Smart Cities and a Stochastic Frontier Analysis: A Comparison among European Cities
2013
The level of interest in smart cities is growing, and the recent literature on this topic (Holland, 2008; Caragliu et al., 2009, Nijkamp et al., 2011 and Lombardi et al., 2012) identifies a number of factors that characterise a city as smart, such as economic development, environment, human capital, culture and leisure, and e-governance. Thus, the smartness concept is strictly linked to urban efficiency in a multifaceted way. A seminal research for European policy conducted by Giffinger et al. (2007) defines a smart city on the basis of several intangible indicators, such as a smart economy, smart mobility, smart environment, smart people, smart living, and smart governance. These authors’ …