Production Frontiers

This book defines and develops measures of various types of inefficiency in production

Rolf Fare (Author), Shawna Grosskopf (Author), C. A. Knox Lovell (Author)

9780521420334, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 November 1993

316 pages, 75 b/w illus. 9 tables
24.2 x 16.3 x 2.8 cm, 0.69 kg

"The book as a whole is cleanly executed and well written....I highly recommend the book as the basic reference on the mathematical-programming approach to the analysis of production frontiers." Journal of Economic Literature

This book presents a mathematical programming approach to the analysis of production frontiers and efficiency measurement. The authors construct a variety of production frontiers, and by measuring distances to them are able to develop a model of efficient producer behaviour and a taxonomy of possible types of departure from efficiency in various environments. Linear programming is used as an analytical and computational technique in order to accomplish this. The approach developed is then applied to modelling producer behaviour. By focusing on the empirical relevance of production frontiers and distances to them, and applying linear programming techniques to artificial data to illustrate the type of information they can generate, this book provides a unique study in applied production analysis. It will be of interest to scholars and students of economics and operations research, and analysts in business and government.

1. Introduction
2. Production technology
3. Input-based efficiency measurement
4. Output-based efficiency measurement
5. Indirect input-based efficiency measurement
6. Indirect output-based efficiency measurement
7. The measurement of price efficiency
8. Graph efficiency measurement
9. Efficiency measurement and productivity measurement
10. Topics in efficiency measurement.

Subject Areas: Economic theory & philosophy [KCA]