The economic value added (EVA), orginally developed by Stern Stewart & Company, is a relatively new financial tool that is being adopted successfully by many firms. However, evidence of EVA as a predictor of shareholders’ wealth is mixed. This paper empirically verifies the effect of productivity growth, a real missing link between EVA and a firm’s financial health, on shareholders’ wealth maximization. The study uses the firm-level data from the Indian food processing industry for the period 1993-94 to 2005-06 to measure and decompose the Malmquist productivity index into its different components, such as technological change, pure efficiency change and change in scale efficiency, by using the technique of data envelopment analysis (DEA). It further examines the linkage between different components of productivity change and market value added, an indicator of shareholders’ weal...

Enticed 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 effi...

Fuzzy 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 Mal...

Consumers decide which aerosol product to purchase depending upon its different features or attributes. The importance that consumers give to each attribute, however, differs from one consumer to another. The ability to identify the importance of different attributes of aerosols from the consumers’ perspective is essential for improving an existing brand or launching a completely new brand of aerosol. The purpose of this study is to identify feasible offerings of aerosols from a company’s point of view and the positioning of a comparatively new brand of room air freshener among all other existing brands in the capital city of Bihar (Patna) in India. The study makes use of conjoint analysis and the multidimensional scaling technique to identify (a) the attributes of the room air freshener and their corresponding levels from the consumers’ perspective, (b) the importance of each attr...

Despite the growing literature on bank efficiency worldwide over the last decade, researchers have neglected the Peruvian banking sector. In this paper, the technique of data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to investigate the efficiency of Peruvian banks for the period 2000 to 2009 to benchmark currently existing banks based on their super-efficiency scores over time. Further, an in-depth analysis of currently existing banks for the period 2008 to 2009 is conducted to check the robustness of DEA efficiency scores and the potential improvement of inputs and outputs for inefficient banks, indicating by how much and in what areas inefficient banks need to improve in order to be efficient. Our finding shows an increasing trend in technical efficiency during the period 2000 to 2009 which gives an indication of an affirmative effect of the reform process in the Peruvian banking sector. On a...