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This chapter develops a productivity analysis of the US pharmaceutical industry via Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). This study concerns itself with 16 US pharmaceutical companies. The output variables are profit margin, operating margin, return on assets, and return on equity. The input variables are corporate workers and market capital. Since negative data appear in DEA, a directional distance approach was applied.

This chapter develops a productivity analysis of the US consumer drug store business using data envelopment analysis. This study concerns itself with five major US consumer drug chains. The output variables used are profit, total revenue, and prescription revenues. The input variables are number of pharmacists, number of drug store assets, and capital equity.

The authors propose a blockchain platform for managing clinical trial data to enhance data validity, integrity, trust and transparency in the pharmaceutical research process. The authors also provide an extensive review of how blockchain technology supports the business processes of clinical trials.

A systematic literature review was conducted to identify the existing applications of blockchain in pharmaceutical process management. A conceptual design for a blockchain infrastructure to address clinical trial challenges is developed by outlining the entire clinical trial value chain and identifying the coordination and communication among its stakeholders. A stakeholder analysis is conducted to ensure that the clinical trial processes satisfy the requirements and preferences of each stakeholder.

The proposed blockchain platform offers a promising solution for enhancing integrity, trust and transparency in the clinical trial process. Additionally, blockchain can help streamline communication and collaboration between stakeholders by enabling multiple parties to access and share data in real time, lowering the possibility of delays or errors in data analysis and reporting.

The proposed blockchain platform can benefit patients by empowering them to have better-controlled access to their data and by allowing researchers to maintain adherence to reporting requirements. Additionally, the platform can benefit granting agencies, researchers and decision-makers by ensuring the integrity of clinical trial data and streamlining communication and collaboration between stakeholders.

This study builds on existing blockchain applications in pharmaceutical process management by developing a blockchain framework that can address clinical trial concerns from an integrated perspective.

The economic crisis has its roots in the financial services industry, but it certainly impacted the higher education in a way that has far-reaching implications for the colleges and universities in the United States. With unemployment rates of 8% and above, it made it difficult for families to send their kids to colleges and as a result colleges faced decline in enrollments and pressure to cut costs. Discount rates at almost all universities with an average size of 8,000 or less went up significantly. Academic departments at various universities came under pressure to get leaner and perform better with fewer resources. In this study, we benchmark the financial performance of public universities and private universities against each other as well as against themselves over the years by using data envelopment analysis model. The study also compares universities, public and private, with less than 3,000 students and more than 3,000 students against each other as well as over a period of time. The study is important as it will help university policy makers identify their strengths and weaknesses so that they can capitalize on their strong academic programs and make changes to fix weaker academic programs.

With the use of meta-goal programming, a portfolio model, based on Morningstar Stock Sector and Morningstar Bond Sectors, is developed. These sectors are part of an indexed mutual fund for stock and for bonds. The asset allocation is based upon a set of four meta-goals: (1) forecasted earnings growth, (2) forecasted revenue growth, (3) unwanted deviation of absolute deviation for the risk for stock investments, and (4) unwanted deviation of absolute deviation for the risk for bond investments.

This chapter develops a productivity analysis of the New Jersey PPO Health Insurance Industry for 2018. The chapter concerns five New Jersey PPO insurance companies. The two output variables are claims paid and loss ratio. The two input variables include premiums collected and assets.

The Black and Litterman model (1992) for estimating asset returns is widely used in industry and has been widely studied in the academic and professional literature. Black and Litterman offer a way to incorporate investor's views into asset-pricing. This chapter provides a description of the Black and Litterman model. The model is analyzed using fuzzy goal programming approach using appropriate membership functions. We consider a real world financial example to implement our approach.

A major consequence of global environmental change is projected to be the alteration in flood periodicity, magnitude, and geographic patterns. There are a number of extant methods designed to help identify areas vulnerable to these consequences, the construction of composite vulnerability indices prominent among them. In this paper we have implemented the Order Rated Effectiveness (ORE) model (Klimberg & Ratick, 2020) to produce composite flood vulnerability indicators through the aggregation of six constituent vulnerability indicators future projected for 204 hydrologic subbasins that cover the contiguous US. The ORE aggregation results, when compared with those obtained using the Weighted Linear Combination and Data Envelopment Analysis, provided a more robust and actionable distribution of composite vulnerability results for decision-makers when prioritizing Hydrologic Unit Codes for further analysis and for effectively and efficiently implementing adaptation and mitigation strategies to address the flooding consequences due to global climate change.