In an in fluential paper Berger and Mester (1997) have proposed the alternative profi t function. It is widely thought that the alternative profi t function does not result in any useful duality properties. We show, in this study, that quite the opposite is true and, in fact, one can recover,...

The empirical analysis of the economic interactions between factors of production, output and corresponding prices has received much attention over the last two decades. Most contributions in this area have agreed on the neoclassical principle of a representative optimizing firm and typically...