The format of this monograph is three essays, which we arrived at after spending a year writing over one hundred pages of what we even tually realized was a tedious reworking of old material. So we started over determined to write something new. At first we thought this approach might not work as a coherent mono graph, which is why we chose the essay format rather than chapters. As it turns out, there is a common thread namely the directional distance function, which also gave us our title. As you shall see, the directional distance function includes traditional distance functions and...

This book presents a mathematical programming approach to the analysis of production frontiers and efficiency measurement. Using linear programming techniques, the authors construct a variety of production frontiers, and develop a model of efficient producer behavior and a taxonomy of possible types of departure from efficiency in various environments. This book provides a unique study in applied production analysis, and will be of interest to scholars and students of economics and operations research, and analysts in business and government.

Professor Sten Malmquist constructed the Malmquist quantity index and in doing so developed a distance function defined on a consumption space. This function is the consumer analog to the Shephard input distance function of producers and is used in ratio form to define the quantity index. This volume contains new contributions based on Malmquist's work nearly 50 years ago and provides modern perspectives on the value of this research.

Our original reason for writing this book was the desire to write down in one place a complete summary of the major results in du ality theory pioneered by Ronald W. Shephard in three of his books, Cost and Production Functions (1953), Theory of Cost and Produc tion Functions (1970), and Indirect Production Functions (1974). In this way, newcomers to the field would have easy access to these important ideas. In adg, ition, we report a few new results of our own. In particular, we show the duality relationship between the profit function and the eight equivalent representations of technol ogy...

Our intention with this book is to extend the efficiency literature to the case of intertemporal models. We do this in steps. First, we introduce static network models which will serve as building blocks for our intertemporal budgeting models and our dynamic models. Next, we devote two chapters to productivity measurements, which we think of as comparative static models. Intertemporal budgeting models and dynamic models are taken up after that. Each chapter, except Chapter One, contains an empirical applica tion. These applications are coauthored with colleagues and stu dents; thanks are due...

The format of this monograph is three essays, which we arrived at after spending a year writing over one hundred pages of what we even- tually realized was a tedious reworking of old material. So we started over determined to write something new. At first we thought this approach might not work as a coherent mono- graph, which is why we chose the essay format rather than chapters. As it turns out, there is a common thread--namely the directional distance function, which also gave us our title. As you shall see, the directional distance function includes traditional distance functions and...

This book presents a mathematical programming approach to the analysis of production frontiers and efficiency measurement. Using linear programming techniques, the authors construct a variety of production frontiers, and develop a model of efficient producer behavior and a taxonomy of possible types of departure from efficiency in various environments. This book provides a unique study in applied production analysis, and will be of interest to scholars and students of economics and operations research, and analysts in business and government.

This graduate text develops production theory from a set of reasonable axioms. The theory is presented both in a primal and dual as well as in an indirect (constrained) framework. The basic model leads to a set of efficiency measures which can be readily employed in empirical work. A first draft of the text was used to teach students at Vanderbilt University. The text includes a variety of exercise problems.