Ewa Chodakowska

Labour efficiency in construction industry in Europe based on frontier methods: data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis

AbstractThe primary problems pertaining to productivity or – more precisely – efficiency are: how to define it and how to measure it. This article studies technical efficiency in Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) – the input-oriented frontier model – in the construction industry and compares it with Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) results. The models explored in this paper were constructed on the basis of two outputs and personnel cost as an input. The research sample consisted of European countries. The aim was to determine whether there are substantial differences in estimation of efficiency derived from those two alternative frontier approaches. The comparison of results according to the models may translate into higher reliability of the undertaken labour efficiency analysis in construction and its conclusions. Although the results are not characterized by high compatibility, the conducted analysis indicated the most attractive countries taking into account labour cost to profit and turnover ratios o...

The Models Evaluating Courier and Messenger Companies in Poland

Abstract Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a well-established, popular, and often used method for efficiency evaluation of units from all sector, both commercial and non-profit organisations, of any scale of operations. Network DEA models are a relatively recent approach used to examine the efficiency of decision-making units (DMUs) having an internal structure of sub-processes. The article presents the concept of DEA network models in estimating the efficiency of courier and messenger companies with relations to their business clients. The considerations are supported by an example of data concerning leaders from the sector of couriers and messengers in Poland and one of the biggest and most popular online stores. The results are compared with the traditional DEA approach. In addition, to measure reliability for DEA scores, the jackknife procedure was performed. The author proves the usefulness of network DEA as a research and management tool.