Economics of Benchmarking

Thijs ten Raa has been affiliated with NYU and Erasmus University and is now Associate Professor of Economics at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. He has published eight books, and numerous articles. In 2006 he was awarded the Wassily Leontief Centennial Medal.

• What is Benchmarking and Why is it Useful?Linear Programming in one LessonThe Technique of BenchmarkingCase study 1: Spanish RestaurantsCase study 2: Indian BanksCase study 3: Korean Quality ManagementCase study 4: Austrian Banking DeregulationEfficiency, Productivity and ProfitabilityCase study 5: U.S. ManufacturingCase study 6: U.S. HotelsCase study 7: European Railways EfficiencyRankingCase study 8: Dutch Economics and Business SchoolsReturns to ScaleCase study 9: U.S. Real Estate Investment TrustsCase study 10: European Railways Returns to ScaleConcluding Remarks.

'Many people in business talk about benchmarking. This book provides techniques that actually enable you to do it'. - John Kay, author of The Truth about Markets 'This elegant book shows how to measure the relative operational efficiency of enterprises. It provides both theoretical guidance and practical examples of techniques that can help identify underperforming and overperforming groups in your organization. Anyone interested in performance evaluation will want to read this book.' -- Hal Varian, Professor of Economics, Business and Information, University of California at Berkeley, USA "This is a smart and delightful way of showing the theoretical underpinning of data envelopment analysis. Experts in linear programming and aficionados of Data Envelopment Analysis as well as the brightest of students will love this short book for the elegance and purity of its reasoning.' - Tom Weyman-Jones, Loughborough University