C44 - Operations Research; Statistical Decision TheoryReturn

The paper emphasizes that any approach to defining technical efficiency in banking is just a different outlook on manifold goals and functions that commercial banks pursue. Three commonly applied approaches, i.e. the service-oriented approach, the intermediation approach and the profitoriented approach, are not in conflict but are complementary in providing information on how commercial banks perform in financial intermediation, provision of banking services and profit seeking. In addition to the methodological contribution of the paper, it investigates the efficiency of the Slovak banking industry over the years 2000-2011 so as to find whether employment of a specific approach changes the view on efficiency of individual commercial banks. To this end, the non-parametric method of evaluation is employed based on the slack-based measure model of data envelopment analysis. The results suggest that general impressions of the efficiency status of individual banks as obtained within the three approaches are similar in most cases.

Many contracts, such as buy-back policy, cost- and revenue- sharing policies, are widely applied in the literature for supply chain coordination problem. However, the additional gain from coordination may not necessarily cover the extra administrative costs incurred by applying these contracts. In this paper, a production inventory problem is considered in a two-level supply chain. The problem is formulated as a Stackelberg game. Then, the retail fixed mark-up (RFM) policy is examined in order to investigate its performance on supply chain. We apply this policy because of its lower administrative costs compared to other policies. We found that RFM policy is not capable of coordinating the channel; however, it leads to considerable improvements over the channel. For example, it is shown that it improves each member's profit and leads to Pareto improvement over Stackelberg policy. Besides, its average efficiency is about 96% of that of integrated policy approach.

Each year, a part of the budget of the City of Prague is allocated among its city districts in the form of subsidies. The objective of the City of Prague is to find such a set of criteria and such a set of relative weights that estimate the expected cost of local public administration best. The objective of each city district is subsidy maximization by influencing the criteria and weights. Two quantitative methods that set the weights without participation of decision makers are presented. The first method is based on the multiple-criteria decision making and the second one on the zero-sum gains DEA model. The illustrative calculations for the year 2012 are presented. An application of the multiple-criteria decision making model requires re-allocation of 8.3% of the total subsidy budget in comparison to the real subsidy values in the year 2012. An application of the zero-some gains DEA model requires re-allocation of 14.0% of the total subsidy to city districts. We are not able to offer any definitive answers about which allocation model is the best one, however, an analysis of the subsidy allocation process can help us in understanding the nature of the subsidy allocation problem and its potential weaknesses.

Channels through which monetary policy affects aggregate demand can be divided into three groups: traditional interest rate channel, other asset price channels and credit channel composed of balance sheet channel (named also broad credit channel), only recently separated bank capital channel and bank lending channel. Banks face troubles in keeping their present or acquiring new financial sources, when central bank tightens its monetary policy. Banks characterized by differences in size, capitalization, liquidity and ownership face different levels of informational asymmetry and are therefore differently affected by changes in monetary policy. If larger, better capitalized, more liquid, state owned and/or domestically owned banks respond weaker to changes in monetary policy it is possible to argue that bank lending channel is effective. This hypothesis is tested on a panel of annual data for individual Slovenian banks in the period between 1993 and 2007 using general method of moments. Results largely confirm the existence of the bank lending channel in Slovenia.