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As the pressure to win and generate revenue and as the allegations of out-of-control spending continue to increase, there exists much interest in intercollegiate athletics. While researchers in the past have investigated specific issues related to athletics success, revenue generation, and graduation rates, no previous studies have attempted to evaluate these factors simultaneously. This chapter discusses the development of a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model aimed at measuring how efficient university athletic departments are in terms of the use of resources to achieve athletics success, generate revenue, and promote academic success and on-time graduation. Data from National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) universities are used to evaluate the relative efficiency of the institutions. The model identifies a series of “best-practice” universities which are used to calculate efficient target resource levels for inefficient institutions. The value of the proposed methodology to decision makers is discussed.

Economic growth of China in the past decades has caused rapid increase in energy consumption and environmental deterioration. Therefore, it is critical to make an environmental evaluation and to help decision makers to know each province’s distance to the optimal target and improve environmental performance.

In such background, the authors use a within-group common benchmarking model with data envelopment analysis for China’s environmental evaluation and target setting in this paper. This model considers a common treatment of decision-making units within groups but allows for the different circumstances across groups and gives a common reference set for benchmarking.

The results show that there are regional difference in economic development and environmental protection. The coastal area has the best average environmental efficiency, then followed by inland area and the lowest level is the western area. The target results show that in four inputs, namely, population, capital, energy consumption and water consumption, the water consumption is the significant variable which should be decreased largely. All provinces have room to improve their economic level under the condition of a better environment.

In this research, the authors consider the similarity in geography and economy for Chinese provinces and divide 30 provinces into eight economic zones; thus, provinces in the same zone are evaluated with the same weight. Environmental performance and efficiency for each province can be obtained. Efficient targets for those inefficient provinces are provided as a possible improvement direction as well.

Various indicators of income inequality and social welfare can be obtained simply by using the Gini index and the mean income of the population. This paper reviews existing indicators and presents several new indicators of this kind. While contemporary researchers seem to be preoccupied with relative inequality, this paper advocates for using intermediate inequality views and supplementing inequality rankings of countries with rankings based on social welfare. Empirical analysis, performed for 36 European countries, demonstrates such an approach’s advantages.

This study draws on the natural resource-based view to analyze the effects of technologies, managerial commitment, and firm strategy on sustainability performance, in terms of both environmental and social profits. It also examines how the effect of green technologies on sustainability performance can be triggered by a managerial commitment to sustainability issues, and by the adoption of a prospector strategy. Multiple linear regression was used to test research hypotheses on a sample of 426 Spanish tourism firms. The results provide important insights into the importance of the adoption of explorer strategies fostering the strategic exploitation of green technologies to obtain new efficient processes, organizational procedures, and products. This research also shows the contingent moderating effect that managerial commitment exerts on the strategic implementation of green technologies for sustainability performance.

The focus of this paper is on reliability and availability design goals. It aims to provide top‐level estimates of the safety and maintainability of future spacecraft systems.

The developed design tool uses basic reliability principles to estimate the probability of a safe mission and the need for repairs/replacement during ground processing, before launch and start of mission, based on the characteristics of the vehicle's main systems: the number of subsystems, the mean time to repair, and the per subsystem average reliability.

A simple reliability, maintainability and safety model is developed to support the top‐level design process of future space transportation vehicles. It also describes how the developed design tool uses various sensitivity analysis functions to improve design decisions.

The goal of the developed tool is to provide engineers/vehicle developers during the early stages of design with a tool that demonstrates the effect on maintainability of improving component reliability and reducing the number of components.

This chapter is designed with the aim to determine the influence of sociodemographic variables on the capacity to generate social enterprises, such as sex, the student’s country, if only they study or if they study and work, as well as if they participate or direct a social enterprise in university students of Latin American business schools. This research adopted an inductive quantitative approach using a questionnaire. The participants were university students of business schools from Colombia, Mexico and Peru. Second-generation structural equation method (SEM-PLS) was used to analyse the results, using the SmartPLS 3.2.7 software applied to data on 3,739 university students. The results suggest that the entrepreneur role, labour situation, country and sex have a moderating effect in the relation between entrepreneurial orientation and entrepreneurial intention. Also, by using resampling technique Bootstrapping (5,000 times,p < 0.01), significance of the trajectory coefficients (beta) and effect size of the coefficients (beta) were measured to demonstrate significance. Finally, with this research the authors ascertain that entrepreneurial orientation positively influences entrepreneurial intention. thus explaining 42.4% of its variance. This chapter is the first attempt on investigating in university students of Latin American business schools about factors of entrepreneurship orientation and entrepreneurship intention, and has strong potential to contribute to development of policies and strategies to promote the growth of entrepreneurship activities in the universities.