Working Papers
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Buscamos profundizar y explorar los conocimientos en las áreas y temas relevantes en los negocios discutidos internacionalmente. Nuestra investigación está dirigida para profesionales y stakeholders de todas las industrias e investigadores que busquen fuentes de información en los temas de investigación relevantes e innovadores en los negocios.
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Item Open Access Student-based brand equity in the business schools sector: An exploratory study(CENTRUM Publishing, 2015) Vincent, Charles; Iona Gherman, TatianaFaced with increased competition, business schools seem to have realized that having the strongest brands, hence, a distinct image, is vital to strengthen their presence in the education marketplace. It is in this context that the present paper focuses on assessing the dimensions of brand equity of business schools from the MBA-enrolled student’s perspective, with a specific reference to the Peruvian market. In this regard, it builds an instrument around five dimensions of brand equity, namely, brand loyalty, brand association, brand awareness, perceived quality, and overall brand perception. Additionally, it furnishes a snapshot of the Peruvian business schools sector by means of providing the order of dimensions pertaining to each business school. The analysis suggests that perceived quality seems to be the most important dimension of brand equity, while the overall brand perception is almost always ranked last. Conceptualizing brand equity from the MBA-enrolled student’s perspective can prove to be useful as this framework could assist business schools in designing marketing strategies to improve their brand equity and gain a higher student share.Item Open Access Joint chance-constrained reliability optimization with general form of distributions(CENTRUM Publishing, 2014) Vincent, Charles; Islam Ansari, Saifu; Khodabakhshi, MohammadProbabilistic or stochastic programming is a framework for modeling optimization problems that involve uncertainty. Stochastic programming models arise as reformulations or extensions of reliability optimization problems with random parameters. Moreover, the resource elements vary and it is reasonable to consider them as stochastic variables. In this paper, we describe the chance-constrained reliability stochastic optimization (CCRSO) problem for which the objective is to maximize the system reliability for the given joint chance constraints where only the resource variables are random in nature and which follow different general form of distributions. Few numerical examples are also presented to illustrate the applicability of the methodology.Item Open Access A Satisficing DEA Model to Measure the Customer-based Brand Equity(CENTRUM Publishing, 2015) Vincent, Charles; Zavala, JorgeEver since the inception of brand values, these have become a benchmark for many data-driven strategies, eventually providing a basis for vertical/horizontal integrations, as well. In recent decades, brands have become comparable across the industries, based on their value derived either from the customer perception or in terms of the firm financials. Numerous models have been developed in time to measure the customer-based brand equity; nevertheless, they all evaluate brand equity in an absolute sense. The present research paper provides an avenue to measure the customer-based brand equity in a relative sense using a satisficing DEA model. The information for this model has been collected through a customer-based survey questionnaire in line with predefined brand equity dimensions, which have been verified through a confirmatory factor analysis. We demonstrate the approach by means of applying the proposed model to measure the efficiency of cell phone brands.Item Open Access Measuring the Performance of a Dehydration Plant of Apples(CENTRUM Publishing, 2015) Sánchez Ramírez, Rodrigo Antonio; Vincent, Charles; González Araya, Marcela; Paliza, Juan CarlosGiven the importance of the Chilean dried-fruit market and the characteristics of the industrial process of dehydration, it becomes imperative for companies to measure the efficiency of their production processes in order to identify critical areas and take the necessary actions to improve them. Hence, the present work performs an efficiency analysis for the production of dried apples in a plant of the Maule region, Chile. The methodology used is Data Envelopment Analysis, considering both discretionary and non-discretionary variables. The results indicate that the application of the model without non-discretionary variables shows higher efficiency indices than the model with non-discretionary variables. Additionally, the efficiency analysis results, segregated by variety, origin, and fruit type, indicate that the selection of these segregations could be used to increase the production or generate higher efficiencies. Finally, the technological change in the same plant is analysed through the Malmquist index. The findings of this research could help improve the decision-making process of managers concerned with the efficient use of resources within the company.Item Open Access A translation invariant pure DEA model(CENTRUM Publishing, 2015) Vincent, Charles; Färe, Rolf; Grosskopf, ShawnaThis short communication complements the DEA model proposed by Lovell and Pastor (Eur. J. Oper. Res. 118 (1999), 46-51), by incorporating both positive and negative criteria in the model. As such, we propose a DEA model, known as pure DEA, using a directional distance function approach.Item Open Access The Right To Be Forgotten – Is Privacy Sold Out in the Big Data Age?(CENTRUM Publishing, 2014) Vincent, Charles; Tavana, Madjid; Iona Gherman,TatianaThe potential of big data has exceeded the expectations of most organizations. However, despite its vast importance and application, some important aspects of big data remain the subject of debate. One of the most sensitive and worrisome issues for big data is the privacy of personal information. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the major theories of philosophical ethics may be used as a referential framework for conceptualizing the evolution of the concept of privacy of personal information in the big data era. We identify a gap in big data research and suggest that while privacy has been extensively explored in different settings, it has not been sufficiently studied relative to the social and technological changes in the big data era. We attempt to fill this gap by proposing that the study of privacy be closely tied to the evolution of the social structure.Item Open Access Regulatory Design and Technical Efficiency: Public Transport in France(CENTRUM Publishing, 2015) Díaz, Guillermo; Vincent, CharlesPublic transport systems are often subject to a close regulatory oversight because of their economic and social impacts. In the case of France, this has led to an institutional design that has involved the participation of private firms in the service provision, and the use of incentive contracts to regulate them, among other characteristics. We study the effect of these institutional features on the efficiency of the firms in the sector. For this, we use nonparametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) techniques to estimate the input usage efficiency, and explore a few potential institutional and regulatory determinants. We apply a conditional DEA approach and fixed effects second stage regressions to control for potentially observed and unobserved sources of heterogeneity across different environments in which the firms operate. Our results point to a differential effect of private and mixed public-private companies. In particular, having the performance of public operators as the benchmark, efficiency is relatively higher for private firms, but lower when the service is delegated to a mixed public-private firm. Furthermore, the effects seem to diverge greatly by contract type when the firm is mixed so that, when the contract is of the cost reimbursement type, performance is lower than the public firm benchmark, while for other contract types there are no statistically significant differences.Item Open Access Adapting Fuzzy Linguistic SERVQUAL Model: A comparative analysis of bank services in Malaysia(CENTRUM Publishing, 2012) Vincent, Charles; Kumar, Mukesh; Suggu, SrinivasFuzzy logic provides a useful tool for dealing with decisions in which the phenomena are imprecise and vague. The application of non-parametric statistical analysis in the SERVQUAL model could be more meaningful in the presence of skewed distribution of customers’ scores. The current paper aims to construct a fuzzy SERVQUAL method for evaluating the service quality of banks in Malaysia for different market segments, namely conventional, Islamic and foreign banks. Further, a comparison of service quality gaps has been assessed with respect to demographic characteristics of the customers to answer a fundamental question “What do customers want from banking services and which elements of service quality is important for different customers?” The sample is made up of 766 bank customers, consisting of the customers from conventional, Islamic and foreign banks from different parts of Malaysia. The data have been collected by using the structured questionnaire, which consists of three sections. Section 1 deals with consumers’ usage of banking channels and their banking behavior. Section 2 contains 26 statements related to service quality dimensions based on past literature. Finally, Section 3 contains the questions related to the socio-demographic profiles of respondents. First, the effectiveness of the Fuzzy linguistic scale and the Likert scale was compared by using the test of internal consistencies on dimensions of service quality. Further, the assumptions of analysis of variance (ANOVA) were checked for appropriateness of statistical analysis to be performed for the comparative analysis. Finally, the SERVQUAL gaps are analyzed and compared across 3 market segments and different groups of customers based on demographic characteristics by using non-parametric approach.Item Open Access A Non-radial DEA index for Peruvian regional competitiveness(CENTRUM Publishing, 2016) Vincent, Charles; Díaz, GuillermoIn this paper, we propose a method to measure competitiveness performance at the subnational level, with an application to Peruvian regions. For this, we propose a benefit-of-the-doubt composite index that summarizes the information of several indicators that characterize competitiveness. It is based on an optimization approach, using Data Enveloping Analysis (DEA) techniques, so that each indicator is weighted in an endogenous way, and each unit is evaluated in the most favourable light. Our proposed index is a non-radial variant of the typical DEA scores, which avoids the traditional pitfalls of DEA-based composite indexes, such as unreasonable weights. Additionally, we propose a meta-frontier approach in order to compare the competitiveness performances across different periods of evaluation. Our assessments of the Peruvian regions' competitiveness performance improve on the results of traditional DEA methods, which award high marks to regions with very heterogeneous performance (i.e., regions with very high scores in some indicators, and very poor in others). Additionally, the comparison of the performance across time shows a general decrease in the average competitiveness between 2008 to 2014 in the Peruvian regions.Item Open Access Evaluating the Performance of Indian Banking Sector using Data Envelopment Analysis during Post-Reform and Global Financial Crisis(CENTRUM Publishing, 2012) Kumar, Mukesh; Vincent, CharlesEnticed by the reform of Indian banking sector in the early 1990s and further slowdown in the economy as a result of global financial crisis in late 2000s, the current study analyzes the performance of Indian banks using data envelopment analysis. The performance is measured in terms of technical efficiency, returns-to-scale, and Malmquist productivity index for a sample of 33 banks, consisting of 19 public sector and 14 private sector banks during the period spanning 1995-96 to 2009-10. The jackknifing analysis, followed by the dummy variable regression model is used to identify the outlier and its possible impact on overall efficiency trends. Findings reveal that efficiency scores are robust in the sense that the inclusion of outlier does not affect the overall efficiency trends. The public sector bank is faintly doing better than the private sector banks in terms of (i) technical efficiency since 2003-04 and (ii) scale efficiency from 2000-01 onwards. There is growing tendency of public banks operating under increasing returns to scale, implying that substantial gains could be obtained from altering scale via either internal growth or consolidation in the sector. The difference in the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) change between these two types of banks is found to be statistically significant in favour of public sector banks. The technological change has been the dominating source of productivity growth, whereas, the contribution of pure efficiency change and scale change are found to be negligible in Indian banking sector during the period of study. The reform in Indian banking sector has clearly re-energized the Indian banking sector as a whole, resulting in a positive change in TFP through technological change possibly as a result of adoption of latest technology and new business practices in post reform period. However, there is evidence of shrink in the market resulting in movement of the banks towards increasing returns-to-scale as well as negative growth in TFP in both the sectors during the period of global financial crisis.