As markets worldwide become less regulated, it becomes increasingly possible and timely to establish the presence of an empirical relationship between technical efficiency and market forces compelling agents to economize. This article, taking an innovative approach to test the hypothesis that...

Inequalities created by relating gauge (distance) functions and their dual support functions have been used in economics and operations research/management science to measure efficiency and productivity. The most familiar example is the Farrell (1957) measure of cost efficiency and its...

This paper reports the results of an investigation into the technical efficiency (i.e. the ability to convert inputs into outputs) the NHS hospital sector. The method employed is the ‘stochastic frontier production function’. In contrast to the approach adopted by Feldstein in his...