Quality-efficiency trade-off when the state is the sole provider of hospital services: Evidence from New Zealand

The purpose of this study is to explore the trade-off between technical efficiency and the quality of hospital services when the state is the sole provider. Data from 20 New Zealand District Health Boards from 2011 to 2017 is used to estimate technical efficiency using the data envelopment analysis technique, which employs an additive inverse formulation for undesirable outcomes. The estimated average quality-adjusted technical efficiency score is 0.69. In comparison, when the quality variable was removed, the efficiency declined to 0.66. More importantly, the ranking of district health boards stays consistent across both models, indicating that there is very little trade-off between quality and efficiency. A sensitivity analysis also confirms the lack of a trade-off between quality and efficiency.     

Customer readiness to co-production of mobile banking services: a customer-only co-production perspective

This paper aimed to identify the antecedents and corollary of customer readiness for co-production in customer-only co-production services using mobile banking services as a context. Using a structured questionnaire, data were gathered from a sample of mobile banking customers in Ghana and the UK and the data analysis was facilitated by structural equation modelling. From the findings, the antecedents were customer socialisation, customer self-efficacy and customer motivation and the corollary was service productivity. The findings provide managers of customer-only co-production or technology-based services particularly mobile banking services with the specific factors that can be managed strategically and tactically to enhance customer readiness for co-production and service productivity. This study is one of a kind to conceptualise and empirically identify the antecedents and corollary of customer readiness for co-production within the customer-only co-production context. However, as the study was limited to mobile banking services, future studies might test the research model in other customer-only technology-based services.